[H-GEN] spinning down (longish)

Electra Flarefire electra at humbug.org.au
Fri Jan 24 02:28:07 EST 2003


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> | But when we're not using our computers (0000hrs-1900hrs weekdays) those
> | 3 drives are spinning and generating heat.  Heat kills 'puters.
> |
> | I'd like to use hdparm to set them to go to sleep.
>
> In my opinion, steady heat from always-on components provides
> the best reliability.  Turning things off and/or moving them
> seem to be the real killers.

>From what I know of motors, harddrive machanics and everything else, I'm
of the opinion that leaving a harddrive running is best for it.

It's not so much the steady heat or stuff about scraping platters, it's
more of a stress thing.
The most stressfull part of a drive operation is overcoming inertia and
starting the platters spinning.. At the moment of platter spin-up, your
using sevrel times as much power as as the motor would be when it just
needs to keep the platters spinning. (Normal running). Your also putting
large stress loads on the verious drive machanics.

One point that I have worried about is the bearings.. Running hot for a
long period of time I would have thought would wear them out, but they are
ment to handle it for longer than the drive would last anyway..
If this is a real worry, get those funky new FD(Fluid Dynamic) bearing
drives they are out, no stuff to wear out once it's running. :)

It IS good to spin hardrives down if:
* It's a laptop harddrive, there designed to handle it and are freaky.
* If the machine is going to be very idle(no disk actvity) for sevreal
  hours. (Routers and such that write logs remotely or very few logs are
  good examples..)
* If your machine crashes due to heat 5mins after the disk starts and
  dosen't if the drives are stopped. But you should get better cooling
  because breathing on it will prolly overheat it then. :)

If you want to cool things down, underclock your machine, add more
fans(watercooling?:), espealy over the drives, it IS best to keep them
from overheating AND make sure the kernel is shutting down the CPU(idle
calls) between instructions.. (nb, running SETI is a bad idea for keeping
things cool:)

This is just opinion, but I belive it's more or less correct, in theory if
not pratice. :)

PS. I /think/ there is a limited number of times you can spin up a drive
before it'll fail, a seporite number from the MTBF. All avrages, but I
belive the MTBF is for /continuiusly running/ equipment.


-- 
Electra Flarefire - Cute Fire-lizard    | for (i=0; i<100; i++) {
http://www.scalehaven.com/electra/	|   kb_wait();
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