Good question, as it’s not really obvious from the post. There’s simple stuff such as energy savings, preventing unneeded file indexes, preventing corruption, etc. The biggest reason is mostly situational to me, as I’ve taken over a bunch of drives from friends who renewed their own, which have been running in their respective NAS setups. The drives are definitely not new but have a reasonable remaining life span. I kinda realized that I don’t need the media files to be available at all times, so to squeeze the most out of the drives, I wanted to try this strategy.

I haven’t yet tried adjusting spin-down options as it’s more predictable when I “manually” spin the drive up and down. I’m afraid the random seeks will still spin up the drives several times a day and hurt them over time.

Ooh this is really nice. I’ll definitely be considering this!

High res image sadly, otherwise I would go the Jellyfin route

If you like puzzle-like games, give Chants of Sennaar a try! The mechanics are super unique, not very difficult either. I loved every bit of it