[Beowulf] cold spare storage?

[mathog]

(Originally posted here:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45719853/enterprise-spare-drives-better-on-shelf-or-spun-down-in-enclosure

but nobody has answered.)

Hi all,

Some Dell servers I recently started managing have spare disks in their 
array enclosures. megacli showed the spares as:

Firmware state: Online, Spun Up

so they are not configured as hot spares. Effectively these are cold 
spares, but ones whose working lifetime is being wasted spinning for no 
good reason. They have now been spun down with:

megacli -PDPrpRmv -PhysDrv[32:5] -a0

which is better for their longevity, I suppose.

The question is: would these spares last longer if they were pulled and 
stored in an antistatic bag in a drawer? Even though they are no longer 
spinning they are still in a warm environment and receiving the 
vibrations from the other disks and fans in these servers. I only found 
some articles about storing drives with data on them, but that isn't the 
case here, they are blank. Has anybody published actual data on this 
issue (as opposed to just their opinion)?

Thanks.

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech