Today we had a brief discussion about the impact of power cycles on the disk drive lifetime. In searching for some background information on this subject, I found the followiing.
http://www.deq.state.or.us/lq/pubs/factsheets/sw/ComputersMonitors.pdf
http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
This is not directly related but found it a nice story so i post it as well.
http://storagemojo.com/category/disk/