How safe is...

[adam917]

...the option for Disk Poweroff when Idle? Would this lower the lifetime of the HDD being that it's always turning on & off (and drive fills the music buffer)?

[petur]

I think it's safe. And it will save you battery time!

[WouteЯ]

I think it's safe.

I think...... That DOESN'T sound safe...

[Mr. Brownstone]

The hard-drive is a moving part. Disk Poweroff will increase mechanical wear slightly.

In either case, the battery will die long before the hard-drive does, so long as you don't drop it too much.

Always keep a backup of your music.

[LinusN]

Disk poweroff will not increase mechanical wear. The disk spins down regardless. The only drawback of disk poweroff is that it takes slightly longer to spin up the drive to fill the buffer, increasing the risk of buffer underrun.

[Llorean]

You could always set it to take disk power up time into account when deciding to start buffering.

[Rincewind]

I have used disc power off for about 10 months now constantly and I NEVER had a buffer underrun.
And if the disc dies because of wear, it is time to upgrade to a bigger one anyway 

(I only use mp3 and some flac, don't know about ogg)

[Llorean]

I have had buffer underruns, but only with FLAC, and only certain points in certain songs (though it'll do it at these points consistently.) It seems to have to do with the fact that they're VBR so it can't properly predict when there's only 5 seconds of song left in the compressed buffer. At least that's my current guess, and I've been told in response there are issues with VBR code.

Setting the anti-skip buffer from 5 to 15, or turning off disk power down, both fix the problems.