I think mostly it will depend on usage of the drive. Things like compiling large RAM eating packages, disk thrashing, and heavy write rates will impact any drive regardless of media type. This is why I don't do SSDs yet. Those magnetic platters can take serious usage abuse.

Yea, usage certainly is the determining factor, all else being equal.

In that regard, the laptop drive (1TB) and one of the 2TB 3.5 dirves both spend a good part of each day compiling and doing DB analytics. So that speaks well for both of those.

I have compiled the sadistic xulrunner on both machines (laptop is 32 bit) more than once, but that is more a test of my own endurance than of the hardware! My doctors say that I sould not do that any more. ;)

IMO, no matter what type of drive you have, you should run smartd and scrape your logs for error messages. You can even use SNMP to report the results.

https://www.pitt-pladdy.com/blog/_20...cti_via_SNMP_/
http://blog.nobiscuit.com/2012/08/07...via-snmp-14-2/

Xulrunner ranks up there in the hardware torture-test department. It's estimated to use about 6GB of RAM and/or swap space... yeah not a hardware friendly package to build mind you, especially when it starts into the swap space after your measly 4GB of system RAM suddenly run out.

wd green series have a some problems with head parking counter, as i remember.
i have a seagate, and a wd disks too, failing is very rare. but in any way, i use two disks in software raid1 in desktop, and the same thing on my homeserver too - there always is risk to fail drive, even most pricey one.

now i be on way to try hybrid ( ssd and hdd) drives - it has price about as old HDD, but must be a bit faster in some moments.

no need to scrape logs - you can set up smartd to message to you, when drive prefail attribute changes, as io remember. instruction seeing on some paper about how to make software raid 1 on slackware....

http://www.mbse.eu/linux/homeserver/...install/#SMART

There is a Linux utility called "wdidle3" to change the head unloading idle timeout (or disable it completely) on the WD Green series.
This will be at the expense of slightly increased power consumption, but less wear on the drive heads.

While it is a 20% increase in power consumption, we're only talking about less than a watt (0.72w) (SOURCE). The wdidle3 program just parks the head, but doesn't affect the platter rotation. The reason you see a slight savings when the head is parked is because it no longer creates any drag on the platters that the motor has to overcome (to maintain the proper speeds).

If your computer runs 24/7, and your electricity costs $0.15/KWh (almost double what is costs here -- $0.08/KWh during the more expensive summer months), you're looking at less than a dollar extra every YEAR. Even if you had 5 harddrives, it is less than $0.40 extra per month.

point of using wdidle is not in energy savings, but in that fact, the device ( hdd) has have a lifetime parameter of parking heads or so on - not clearly remember, it is regarding WD green series, and count is about 300 000. and as i read, on some servers that parameter grow on thousands every day, who in result do very short hdd life. i bit investigating that question about a 2 years ago, when purchase my wd30ezra for fileserver storage.

http://www.ngohq.com/news/19805-crit...reen-hdds.html

Just to throw in some numbers about WD Green longevity, I bought this one in 2009, IIRC:
This drive had different roles in its lifetime, being part of a RAID-0 and RAID-5 array (using mdadm), running standalone and nowadays being part of a BTRFS RAID-1. Still working like on day one, exactly zero problems.

Well, using it wouldn't even create savings as it will use more power disabling the head parking.

But I agree, wdidle is not supposed to be used to affect power usage (whether to increase or decrease it... extra power consumption is only a byproduct), it is designed to minimize the wear created by causing the head to park. The drive is only designed to withstand a certain amount of head parks, and the default timeout on the older green drives could cause several hundred head parks in a day, which can cause you to exceed the rated amount in a short amount of time. One site said they'd noticed 500-600 head parks every day, which would cause the drive to exceed the manufacturer's rating in under 2 years.

I had a drive with almost 200k head parks in about 2 years. I have since disabled head parking on that drive to minimize additional wear and relegated it to second string...