[filmscanners] Re: HD failure [was RE: keeping the 16bit scans}

["Arthur Entlich" <artistic-1@shaw.ca>]

Thank you for this!

Cycling equipment regularly and very often , as can happen with hard
drives used under an "energy management" system I do expect can be
detrimental to some components.  But turning equipment on and off once a
day so it remains unused for 8-12 hours or more, 1/3 to 1/2 or more of
its potential "on time" were it kept on 24/7, seems to make sense to me.

Art


Kapetanakis, Constantine wrote:

> I am not sure where people get the impression that by not switching
> equipment "off" they will extend its life. For 99.9% of the time that is
> false.
> Equipment fails from either "random stresses","manufacturing defects" and
> "wear-out". When any equipment is turned off is NOT subjected to any
> external stresses, wear-out is pushed further out etc.
> As a reliability engineer i have not run across a case where leaving
> equipment "ON" improved its life.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bob Frost [mailto:bob@frost.name]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2003 8:11 AM
> To: KAPETAC@polaroid.com
> Subject: [filmscanners] Re: HD failure [was RE: keeping the 16bit scans}
>
>
> Mike,
>
> Thanks for that info.
>
> Like you, I have never used HD power management; that seems like asking for
> trouble. But I do turn the computer off at night. From your figures of
> 40,000 HD startup cycles, that gives a mean life of 120 yrs if turned off
> once a day. Good enough for me, and better than the MTBF.
>
> I think the important thing that many people and computer manufacturers
> don't consider is the "at 40 degrees C" that you mentioned. Many cases have
> little or no cooling for the hard drives; others have the facility to add an
> extra fan to cool the drives, but don't include it as standard. My current
> box (a CoolerMaster) has two extra fans pulling cold air in straight over
> the drives. My previous one had a moulding for a drive fan, so I added it.
> With the bigger, faster drives that we are now using (with multiple drives
> in close proximity in a box), this may be a serious factor in HD life.
>
> Some people seem to be very unlucky with HD's, or they mistreat them. How
> many times have I told people NOT to move their computers while they are on
> and the drives spinning, or kick them when they are under the desk! I have
> been using computers for many, many years and I've only had one HD fail!!
> Famous last words, I suppose.
>
> I suspect most HD's get thrown away long before they fail. I've just
> 'retired' an old 1GB drive that has been in and out of several boxes in it's
> time, but it is not even big enough for a PS scratch disk or Win pagefile
> these days!
>
> Bob Frost.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mike Brown" <mike.brown@mindblown.com>
>
> In the intersts of keeping an interesting thread going here are some typical
> reliability figures for hard drives:
>
> Mean time Between Failure 300,000 hours (ie one failure every 34 years)
>
> Start/stops (at 40 deg C) 40,000
>
> On the basis of those figures I turned HD power management off on my PC. I
> was finding the disks were getting turned off maybe twenty times a day,
> which equates to one failure every 5 years or so.
>
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