[plug] Fax & Voicemail Random Thought...

[Craig Ringer]

> From what I've heard, turning on and off computers reduces the life of the 
> components, especially mechanical ones like hard drives. Some recommend, for 
> maximum lifetime, to leave them running all the time.

There is a lot of disagreement on this one. I'd think that a balance 
would be best m'self - don't shut down when you're not using it for 5 
minutes, don't leave it on and unused for a month while you go on 
holiday either. The balance point is somewhere between those two 
extremes I expect.

There are mechanical wear issues with long running times, but then there 
are temp change stresses involved in power-off and power-on, as well as 
additional mechanical streses (spin-up, etc). In the end, my attitude is 
"I don't really care, if it dies I'll deal with it then, and I keep good 
backups." By the time the PC is likely to die ( 4 - 8 years ) I probably 
won't be much inconvenienced anyway - "bugger, I guess I need a new 
firewall - now, what I do I have in the spares heap..."

> I don't know how accurate this is, but I HAVE witnessed before powering down a 
> machine that had been running for years, where powering up had the HDD fail. 

Yeah, been there done that. *sigh*. I suspect its the heat myself - the 
drive cools, changes shape slightly, there are stresses involved. All 
well and good if its in good condition but if its not far from failing 
anyway it'll most likely die when power-cycled, especially if allowed to 
cool.

> In fact, we powered the machine down to connect a Tape Drive so we could 
> properly back up the content of the HDD which didn't power back up. ;_;

One more reason to want hot-swap components.



-- 
Craig Ringer
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