My secondary hard-drive (platter) sometimes has a lag of 1-5 seconds when it hasn't been accessed in a while, causing explorer or other software to stutter.
Reading online, I saw the advice that you should change it so the hard drive never turns off using this setting:
Is that relatively safe to do?
Yes, this is perfectly safe.
The advantage of powering mechanical drives down when not in use is simply to save electricity. Mechanical drives typically draw between 5 and 6 watts. You can look at your electric bill and see how much your power company is charging you per watt-hour and get an estimate on how much more it will cost you to leave it on. It isn't much.
Yes, it’s safe but it has its disadvantages.
Due to constant spinning mechanical parts will start to fail earlier. This is just how stuff works, things wear, tolerances broaden, things break. Most popular brands of hard drives will last a long time, if you take care of them. My thoughts on this, is have one small fast drive for the work and large drives for storage, which will be powered down most of the time. This way you use them efficiently.
If bumped when when mechanical parts are moving then you will risk irreparable, way too expensive, damage. Some laptops have an accelerometer that deactivates the HDDs, or move the heads away, when it's in free fall. I don’t know if this feature is available for desktops, or servers.
It will draw more power, plain and simple. The power consumption will vary according to physical size, storage technology, etc; but in the end it is going to take its toll on your bill, or battery.
Do it if you need to, otherwise leave it be: it's just a couple of seconds.
Yes, this option is only designed to save electricity. In fact, spin-up/spin-down count is a much stronger indication of wear and tear than actual time spent spinning. Hard drives are designed to spin up and stay spinning; constantly spinning them up and down actually damages the drive more than keeping it spinning. See Is turning off hard disks harmful?
This is an old post an a lot of opinions, but wanted to add an experience that I had
I used to work on ISP long long time ago, and we had 2 identical servers. They were configured as fail over, and some times we switched to one server while we were updating (patching) the other one and so on. It wasnt so critical so we had couple of drive and using raid at software level, both running 2016 (top OS at that time).
One server had the option to put the disk to sleep after 20 mins of inactivity, and the other not (A mistake during the set up). 2 years latter one server start having issues with 2 of the 6 disks. And ended up being the server with the "sleep" disk configuration, and the smart errors were mostly on the spin up.
From there, I understood that the drives suffer more stress spinning down and up, than kept running all the time.
At the end of the day, the energy difference (not a subject of interest on this ISP), wont make difference if you need to replace a disk early. In fact, will be more expensive by far.
