{{Had a stroke in 2011, and my memory is pretty bad}}

I recall, from a few years ago, that an External HDD, has a limit on either mounting the drive OR the amount of time using the drive itself.

Is this true?

If so, could I just keep the drive on constantly? But that also develop a heat problem...

Any answers would be helpful, I guess.

Thank you for reading my question, and have a great day!

I anticipate no problem. Some computers are made to work only with external drives. The only problem I've had is booting with them; I hope that's a problem with my hardware, not general. External connections are often slower.

How are you connecting? Something other than USB?

There are no software limits on the number of mounts or the amount of time for using an external HDD.

The HDD hardware will eventually wear out. The platter spins at a high rpm, the faster the better from a performance standpoint. The read/write heads float above and below the platter like the brake pads on a car float near the brake disk. When the platter bearings wear enough to create a wobble then you will have a head crash. The platter hits the read/write heads, the read/write heads gouge the platter, and the crashed read/write heads seize the platter into immobility. You cannot retrieve the data on a crashed HDD.

I have never had a head crash. Over time I have replaced my HDDs with higher capacity HDDs before they wore out.

Some manufacturers release estimates of Mean Time Between Failure for their drives. Here is a Seagate discussion of MTBF:


https://www.seagate.com/support/kb/h...-afr-174791en/

Yes, many years with one particular external drive I think it was WD, it would go to sleep after idle timeout but linux could not wake it up. You could disable sleep mode from Windows only.

As far as I know that problem no longer exists and I have not had any problems with any of my USB drives.

1: I only use Seagate.

2: The drive {8 TB} is for backups only.

3: Thank you concerning the lack of any mounts/time-used for my backup drive.

Since I replace my internal drives every 2 years, I guess I will replace my backup drive every three years {yeah... I have lost data in the past, but I do learn from my mistakes, in general}

Thank you all who have responded to my question.
Have yourself an excellent day!

I've been backing up to external drives for 20 years without incident.

Part of the purpose of backups for me is that I can tolerate drive failure. I can't remember a drive failing. I've outgrown them, but they still worked.

As I spent time in maintenance I've pulled more dud drives than most. I never met a jammed drive like jailbait describes.

There is one other failure mode. With any ball bearing the cage of a worn bearing can collapse. Then the ball bearings can collect on one side of the cage, and suddenly huge play develops. The heads can gouge the surface then, and no drive survives that. Needless to say, bits of cage lying about also cause havoc.