[pooloo1]

How is the benefit negligible? You are running consumer drives that are not designed to be run at a 100% load 100% of the time. The drives are not meant to be spun up constantly; in fact, many of them have mechanisms designed for them to spin down between use and lower power consumption. It's like complaining about a drag racer not being able to haul a ton of bricks without breaking the transmission on a regular basis.

[kalleboo]

Has anyone done a teardown of two drives and compared the materials? Many enterprise and OEM drives really just seem to be the same hardware as consumer drives, only with different firmware (the "power-saving" spindown) and more rigorous QC.

[rubber_duck]

>How is the benefit negligible?

I believe when you're buying as much drives as they do and produce the kind of reports they do they measure and compare before reaching that conclusion.

[greyskull]

The decision can't be made in isolation. They need to ensure that the extra cost of the drives makes up for the increased reliability - that's not necessarily the case.

[effie]

> The drives are not meant to be spun up constantly;

I think having the drives spin constantly is the best for lifespan, because there are less spinups and thus components wear less.

[Already__Taken]

There should be no wear at all once it's running, read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_bearing

So barring any manufacturing defects that I'm soure would be abundantly clear early on, it's down to logic or electrical failures.