this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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It's actually the opposite.
Spinning up and down puts parts under more stress than simply spinning constantly, assuming vibrations are minimal. Basically repeated changes in velocity are bad for mechanical parts, compared to just spinning at a constant rate.
Hard drives are so variable and failures so unpredictable, I bet you can't find that information. Most of the actual data about hard drive failures, like Backblaze's reports, are for drives that don't spin down.
That said, spin-down has always been used for saving power, not drive lifetime. I would generally assume spinning down never extends lifetime. Even in the case of an external hard drive you plug in once a month - it is very likely going to fail earlier than the drive spinning 24x7.
Also, I wouldn't shy from keeping the database on the same, fast storage as the OS, even if that's flash. Move to an external SSD when you can. HDDs have such long seek times.
Very much true. I installed Immich on my dads Synology for him and compared to my own setup at home the speeds are abysmall (it even crased a few times during the first indexing and ML run). I suspect a major part is that the whole os runs on an hdd.
If you put the database on an sd-card just ensure you make frequent backups somwhere else. I wouldn't trust flash storage to keep my data safe.
It is worse for life expectancy.
Your's is an interesting edge case but maybe the best solution is keeping a folder full of pics on an external drive and plugging it in only when you need it?