lordSauron wrote: > True... makes me wonder about the frequency of drive faliures. Those > who have experience: how often does that happen? I've never had a > drive fail in my life, but I'm your normal desktop user so my PC is > off for about 8-16 hours a day.
It might actually be more stressful on a hard drive to power it on and off once per day than it would be to just leave it on 24/7. Accelerating the platters requires a lot more work from the motor than simply maintaining constant velocity. Compared to constant operation, it would certainly be worse to turn a hard drive on and off with a period of one minute, and it would be better with a period of one year; I just don't know know at what point on the continuum once per day lies. Is it better or worse? Since this thread is somewhat off-topic anyway, does anyone care to venture a guess? I've had four IDE drives die on me over the years: 1. Western Digital 3.2GB 5400RPM. This survived about 2 years of mixed usage. At first it was power-cycled often, but later on I left it on more of the time. The failure was a sudden head crash. 2. Maxtor 30GB 5400RPM. This one died after only a few months with a sudden head crash (it got very hot, too). I replaced it with a 1 year old Maxtor 27GB 7200RPM, and it's still working now after 4 years of constant operation. 3. Western Digital 120GB 7200RPM. This drive gradually got very noisy, and eventually Linux started reporting DriveReady SeekComplete errors. Over a few days, these errors got more and more frequent. 4. Toshiba 40GB 4200RPM laptop drive. When I bought a used laptop I figured I'd have to replace the hard drive. A month later I got DriveReady SeekComplete errors. Over a few days, the errors got more and more frequent. In all, that's about 1/8 of all the drives I've owned or operated. I've also seen 5 or 6 other people's hard drives fail. 3 of those were IBM Deathstar 60GXPs. -Corey -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
