Hibernation and HDD Lifespan?

[Will]

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:

Massive Report of Hard Drive Failure Rate - Back-blaze data from 235,608 hard drives

Backblaze Hard Drive failure Report 2022 A lot of people have not seen that every year backblaze.com publish their complete hard drive failure rater for each year. This has data from their 235,608 hard drives and they publish it every single year. Though do note that a lot of the data is from various ages, so it can be tough to get apples to apples comparisons. SMART Data vs Hard Drive Failure Probably the most useful article they have is about hard drive SMART data, and what is a good indic…