Drives built to be run 24x7 are known as "enterprise" class and they usually have SAS interfaces on them. In the past these would have been your high end SCSI or Fibre Channel devices. They feature higher performance, better error detection and recovery, and more features (physical and firmware). These drives are generally more expensive.
Consumer grade drives are a bit of a different - they are a volume business so cost is everything. While the consumer grade hard drives are not built to the same standards that enterprise class hard drives are, warranty returns have a higher relative cost because the profit margins are so slim, so the manufacturers still want them to go out the door and never come back. The key to a long life for a hard drive is to minimize the vibration and the heat. Vibrations are hard on the servos. "Gentle usage" might make a small difference, but nothing in comparison to vibration and heat. The fan in your big desktop power supply might be more of a threat due to the vibration it creates than any prolonged seek activity. And don't worry about SSDs displacing "spinning rust" anytime soon ... their cost and capacity has to improve a lot. But for raw speed, they can't be beat. And for laptop use, not having to worry about heads crashing is a nice feature too. Mike ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
