[lextek]

Loving my new Mini set-up.  Right now I have all music files on the internal drive.  eventually I will add an external HD.  Do people leave the Minis and HD on 24/7?

[jparkhur]

I have a dedicated apple mac mini and 4 external 4TB drives.  I do not leave them on when not in use.  I use one drive as the main library, the second as a back up that runs every month, third is all my hi rez music for music player and the 4th drive for a back up to the hi rez drive.  I leave the two drives plug in by usb and plug the other ones in when doing  a monthly back up.  Could I leave them on all the time, sure, just trying to save life expectancy.  JP 

[thotfulspot]

There is always the argument that turning on and off the drives is harder on drives than letting them go to sleep. I used to work in a lab at IBM where we had hundreds of drives on all the time. We would replace a couple a week. We would run Raid5 or Raid10 on the drive cabinets. Hard drive technology has come a long ways.

I've got a couple of years old Mini with a SSD and a external hard drive that get backed up using Time Capsule. I've got a Synology NAS that has 2 external bays, so 15 Drives. Each bay is set up as Raid5. Everything is hooked to APC batteries so they can power down gracefully. Having drives get hit with a power outage will at some point kill them. I also let everything go into sleep mode.