On Tuesday 01 November 2005 23:11, Tony Lill wrote: > Dewey Smolka <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > As someone who has professionally destroyed hard drives (most of us > > here are only practiced amateurs), what kind of recommendations/ best > > practices can you offer to ensure maximum HDD life? What are some > > warning signs we should look for, other than 'my drive has come to a > > literal screeching halt'? SMART is nifty, but in my experience has > > only warned me of problems after I knew there were problems. What can > > I do to detect a drive failure before it occurs, and to get my data > > off before the drive becomes unreadable? > > First, a question. What's the current philosophy on spinning down > drives? Is it better or worse for longevity that keeping them spinning > and idle? I've got my recordings spread across a bunch of drives, 5 > are exclusively used by myth, with a spin-down time of about 20 > minutes. Given the typical myth usage, these can stay spun down for hours. >
spinning up is the hardest thing for the little motor to do, the more you do it the more it will put wear on the motor's windings. As well, spinning up takes a lot of energy, which heats the motor windings causing the wear, but also using this extra amount of energy. In fact, when rebooting a computer, its actually better to not let the harddrive platters come to a stop before repowering them, because if you repower while they still have some inertia you significantly reduce the amount of energy the motor requires to start spinning the platters. Now, for example, on a laptop, its actually better to leave the harddrive spinning than to have it put the harddrive to sleep after a few minutes of inactivity. I don't know what the equal energy point is, but considering the wear and tear as well, I feel its safer to set the harddrive sleep time on a laptop running on batteries at the ~10minute area. For desktops (which only get powered on when needed and don't run 24/7) I suggest never letting the drive go to sleep, the cost for the power to leave the drive spinning is minimal compared to the wear and tear on the motor. It should also be noted that desktop motors are much more robust than laptop motors, so they can endure many more starts. For a computer constantly running like our MythTV systems, I would use a thought process similar to the laptop one... Considering most shows are based on 30minute "blocks" you would want to set your sleep time on a multiple of 30 and based on your recording habits. for example, if you do most of your recordings during primetime with no more than 1 hour in between recordings, set your harddrive sleep time to just over an hour (1hr5mins for example), this way you prevent the drive from going to sleep between recordings, but after the final recording for the evening, and final viewings, it will go to sleep overnight. Hope this helps, Steve _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
