HD failure Help

it is good to leave hdd's running, as vader said. Turning on and off is when they will fail. That is why I hate rebooting my computer!!!

I searched on google and I cant find the answer to that, the opinion seems to be split,,,
http://www.computing.net/answers/windows-95/to-turn-off-hard-drive-or-not/165602.html......
http://discuss.pcmag.com/forums/thread/1004387518.aspx

The principle about electric motors and HD is correct the theory is a little miss placed though if your computer consisted only of HDs and nothing else then this idea would work great. Your adding to the wear of every thing by leaving it on all the time. If it's a server your going to run it like that. Home machine I would say if it's not in use turn it off that's what I do and it's been fine for me. Your electric bill will pay for a small part replacement in no time.

Heat is the most destructive force to hard drives not turning them on an off. If you can not keep the heat factor under 100 degrees you will destroy HDs.

Yes heat is a bad thing. In our data centers we keep everything at 68 deg. here at my house, I have the stuff in a cool room as well and when the weather gets hot, at the very least lots of airflow.

Personally I'm not in favor of external drives because they offer very little air flow. Sure the metal body of the hard drive is a heat sink but it doesn't offer enough heat dissipation. After all those drive are running at 5400 - 10000 rpms let alone the heat from the other compoents. You know what's going to happen if you shut down all the fans in your computer as well as I. MELT DOWN !!!!
How many of us use power management to shut down our hard drives? My guess is not many. They probably don't know they can.