Constant (24h/day) hard drive usage - it isn't healthy - is it?

I have a few drives, including SSDs and HDDs on my desktop setup.

Most of them I use heavily, but not "constantly" (maybe with an exception of of the system SSD drive), that is - some of them keep my backups (which I create every day, but it takes only about 20 minutes, and use them rarely). Some are used to keep a few big things, like virtual box VMs. I use them every few days, but again - not longer than for about 1 hour.

Now there is this one disk - an external (USB) HDD, which is (was) there only for one purpose - it keeps my music and video files. And this one disk just stopped working (it's dead).

There is one thing which worried me a bit, this one disk was being used 24 hours a day, because I never stop my music player.

I use Audacious player on my Ubuntu OS (but I doubt it matters). Since I was worried that the LED on the disk was constantly flickering (i.e. the drive was working) I thought that it is a bit silly that the player doesn't buffer the whole audio file before playing it, but instead it reaches the disk every few seconds. But I googled this and I couldn't find anyone else wondering about it.

There is a setting called "Buffer" but the max I can set it 10 seconds.

I've just tried a few other music players, but I can't see any configuration like "buffer up to X MB" or anything like that.

Am I crazy or I'm right that this constant reaching to the data on the drive could lead to the damage of the unit? Or even it has to lead to the damage after e.g. a few years of using it?

And if so, and considering that apparently the developers of music players don't care too much about it, is there maybe some other solution?

Solution 1:

It is not at all clear that buffering the songs will put less wear on the drives - there are 2 scenarios to consider in the buffering case - the drives will continue to spin while waiting to read - which I would have the same overall impact as reading periodically or spinning down and starting up regularly. - which is significantly more stressful on the drive but saves power.

The solution to constant reads on HDD (if you are still convinced its a bad thing) would be to create a RAM disk, copy the songs to it and read from there. A technically better - but more expensive solution would be to migrate to an SSD - as they are discrete devices there is no difference between reading in bursts and continuous reads and as you are reading rather then writing it would not add wear to the SSD.

Another approach entirely would be to put your data in the cloud and stream directly over it. This would make it other peoples problem - and at a mass level they are likely to do predictive caching on a file level.

Solution 2:

Now there is this one disk - an external (USB) HDD, which is (was) there only for one purpose - it keeps my music and video files. And this one disk just stopped working (it's dead).

USB Hard Drives are not the same as commercial and high end workstation hard drives and will generally not last as long or take the same constant use.

We have had numerous USB hard drives die on us - way more than workstation hard drives.

And if so, and considering that apparently the developers of music players don't care too much about it, is there maybe some other solution?

If you need more drive capacity than your computer provides, a good quality NAS with top quality hard drives (or now even SSD drives) will last longer. I would do this instead of external USB hard drives.

For workstations with good drives, I leave these running 7x24 "forever". Top quality drives are made for this.