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Topic: When pausing in foobar does the hdd head arm go back to it's starting position? (Read 447 times) previous topic - next topic
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When pausing in foobar does the hdd head arm go back to it's starting position?

This might be a weird and scientific question and maybe doesn't limit itself to foobar only and many other media software. But when I pause a track in Foobar that is stored on a harddrive does it's arm go back to the starting position? This is using Windows. How about using Linux is it the same behaviour there as well when using foobar?

Does it wear the HDD platter more to use the pause button?

Re: When pausing in foobar does the hdd head arm go back to it's starting position?

Reply #1 –
I would say that it doesn't really matter. On a modern computer as soon as you start playback, the whole file is cached into RAM and the hard drive has done its thing until the next file is to be loaded. For compressed audio files you have each song in its own audio file that is only a few megabytes in size. A quick and dirty way of checking this would be to start playback of a song from a USB mechanical hard drive and disconnecting the drive once the playback starts and the LED indicator stops blinking and seeing for how long the playback continues.
The drive's arm also doesn't go to the starting position (parked) once it's done with a read/write operation. This happens once the timeout for power saving is reached, which varies, but is definitely not as soon as a read/write operation is done, that's when the timer is started. It usually takes minutes before power saving happens if there are no read/write operations in that time.
I think modern drives don't suffer from the arm (head) parking many times in its lifespan.
There probably are differences between using different media players (cache used, etc.) and also between different OSes (different power saving), however, I would say in general, they are not so big to make a really significant difference to this particular behavior.
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Re: When pausing in foobar does the hdd head arm go back to it's starting position?

Reply #2 –
Quote from: qidjklxoid8890 on
This might be a weird and scientific question and maybe doesn't limit itself to foobar only and many other media software. But when I pause a track in Foobar that is stored on a harddrive does it's arm go back to the starting position? This is using Windows. How about using Linux is it the same behaviour there as well when using foobar?

Does it wear the HDD platter more to use the pause button?
Neither FB2K nor any other program have any control over this.

Programs do not access the HDD directly, when they need data from the file system they ask the operating system for it, the operating system processes the request to convert it into low-level HDD commands which are then sent onto the HDD which returns the raw data, and the operating system interprets the raw data into a data packet to pass on to the program which asked for it.  Meanwhile, multiple other programs/processes are also making requests which are queued up and interleaved with the HDD activity for FB2K.

Head parking is something a modern HDD does by itself, if there is a period of inactivity or when the drive gets shut down.  Different drives, optimised for different purposes, have different parking strategies.  Video drives park less because they are optimised for continuous data transfer rather than burst activity.  Laptop drives park the head if they detect free-fall, to minimise the risk of damage if the computer is dropped.  It's not something the user gets involved with, except by choice of drive type.

And there is no wear.  With a disk spinning at 5,000 RPM, do you think a drive would last very long if there was wear?  The heads fly over the surface of the disk on a cushion of air like a hovercraft, and the only risk of wear is if the heads move when the disk isn't spinning or if a mechanical shock overcomes the cushion.  That's why portable drives park the heads when they detect zero G – so the impending impact does not knock them into the data surface.

In short: there's no need to worry about it.
It's your privilege to disagree, but that doesn't make you right and me wrong.