Usefulness / harm of turning off the HDD by the power system in Windows 7?

Question

Electronics

Actually, the question is partially voiced in the title. Now a little more.
Windows 7 has various power management systems, the most standard of which (default) is "balanced", which turns off hard drives after 20 minutes of inactivity.
I have 3 hard drives - 1 for the system, the other two are 2 Terabytes each - green versions of Western Digital, for storage. The system one, of course, does not turn off after 20 minutes, it is the green ones that turn off.
Actually, this is the question - what is more useful, turn on the machine, for example, in the morning, and work on it all day, while hard drives, although they can be idle, nevertheless do not turn off.
Or turn on the machine in the morning, also work all day, but at the same time, after every 20 minutes of inactivity, the HDD will turn off, and start up again when they are accessed.
Logically, I understand that during the day the number of HDD on / off cycles in the second option will increase several times, but still I decided to ask for an opinion.
The car is a hospital. I set up the power management system so that the disks do not turn off, is it not in vain.

Answer 1

Theoretically, the number of parking lots is limited, so this should be avoided, as it were.
In practice, it is limited to a fairly serious number, and once every 20 minutes is not a number at all (there were problems with green screws that parked every 3-5 seconds, as soon as they noticed a downtime, so even during operation they parked, then unparked, and even then this “problem” was noticed after a year with active use). The energy savings are just as tiny.
So there is no practical point in saving (exaggerating) 2 watts per month in a hospital and extending life from 20 years to 50.

Answer 2

A few years ago I read the results of a study that one cycle of parking is equivalent in terms of wear and tear to about 5 hours of work. Whether anything has changed since then is hard to say.

Answer 3

Turning off the power leads to the parking of the heads, an operation with a rather limited resource. For laptops, it makes sense to park the heads, as this can save the surface of the disk from damage during throwing and other loads, and for a desktop computer, the life of the disks will be extended by their constant operation and rare parking. You are doing everything right, especially considering that the disks are “green” and consume less than usual ones when they are running.

Answer 4

I have an SSD as the main one, and for everything else - WD Blue. WD Blue goes to bed in 20-30 minutes. The point here is of course not in saving on electricity, but in noise. When the hard drive goes to sleep - the PC is not audible, and when it is working - noise is heard (even in a noise-protective case).
The fact that due to the periodic transition to sleep mode, the screw will die faster - I think it’s not a very urgent problem, because. often the screws themselves die faster than we would like. Those. On a practical note, I don't think it makes sense to not allow the system to turn off an inactive hard drive: new drives aren't all that expensive, and you can buy one every couple of years.

Answer 5

System on SSD
Archive-working files, software, music, video on HDD
It starts to piss me off a little when every 20 minutes the HDD falls asleep, then I didn’t seem to touch anything, it turns on and so on in a circle all day.
Set the shutdown time to 60 minutes. This is already quite enough that if you need it, it is available for an hour, and if you don’t need it, then turn off and you shouldn’t notice until you climb onto the disk.