power settings for servers

[Tom Barnes_2]

i manage serveral servers in an office building and i am wondering about using the power settings to turn of the hard drives when they are not in use. does anyone know if it is better just to leave them running all night, or to have them turn off after say 30minutes of inactivity.
I have two database servers using raid 10 (six disks), a file server raid 10 (8disks) and a domain controller mirror 2 disks.

[Chandan Kumar_1]

Hi Tom,

You can leave them running all the time. No issues.

Go through the following web link:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/russel_02march25.mspx

Thanks,
Chandan.

[Thomas Bianco]

yes you can, but why whould you?

while it's true that drives are rated in spin-hours, but starting the drive is actually harder on the bearings and motors then running overnight.

since it's connected to the AC mains, power utilization isn't a big deal.

lastly, drive spinup can take up to 2 seconds, which is more then enough time for a file access request to time out, causing all kinds of fun problems

[Tom Barnes_2]

thanks for the advice, i'll leave them running.
tom