It's been a fun 'arms race' of sorts between hard-drive manufacturers and FAANG-esque coders. I have a friend that works for a very big hard-drive company. So,

It's been a fun 'arms race' of sorts between hard-drive manufacturers and FAANG-esque coders. I have a friend that works for a very big hard-drive company. So, think very large data storage at scale. Well, they discovered that a fair bit of their spin-disk machines would get to the max rotation lifetimes with little reader-head arm movement. AKA, they were just run for months at a time without ever being really used. This was after the inherent 'shut off if nothing has been written to you in XXX sec.' code that runs on every machine. They had some digging about, and it turned out that most of the FAANG guys would just write a test bit every XXX-1 sec. to keep the disk spinning. As it improved their internal metrics on 'up time' or whatever else they thought was important. So silly. So, the manufacturer then wrote code to deal with that code to try to save the bearings. And soon enough that code was discovered, and more complicated code was made to keep the disk spinning no matter what. And back and forth until my buddy retired and stopped caring about this strange little 'arms race'. I suppose it's still going on though.