Do you guys recommend turning off HDD Hibernation? Does it really help to extend the lifespan of an HDD?
I have never bothered. I always buy the Pro versions so I have a 5-year warranty on the drives, I always want them ready when I am and not have to power up, any tiny R/W I might save from the drives being in hibernation, I personally don’t think it’s worth the trade-off.
Also, I don’t recommend having them go into hibernation often (like after 20 mins of inactivity for example) as the more the drives shut down, boot up, and repeat, that’ll likely kill them faster.
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I have started to disable hard drive hibernation on all the units that I setup for clients, or at least at the minimum setting the hibernation to something like 4 hours. I have found (anecdotally, could just be happenstance) that drives that have had hibernation enabled tend to be more likely to have issues than those that do not.
Unfortunately BackBlaze who publishes the best data on hard drive failure out there, disables hibernation so there is not much good empirical data on if HDD hibernation reduces the life of NAS hard drive.
If you have not checked out the BackBlaze data its worth a read. The SMART test one is great, and the Annual Failure report is solid too:
Regardless of what reputable reports say, my 19 years of experience have me convinced that the more you turn off and on a drive, the sooner it will fail. There are reports that back that up too. I go with what I’ve learned from experience.
Interstingly enough there seems to be an advanced hibernation mode on the ds923 that I don’t see on the 1621. I’ve gone ahead and disabled it anyway 