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A computer undergoes the most electrical stress when turning on, and doubly so for any components that also experience physical stresses such as HDDs and fans.
by Dalewyn 4y ago
A computer undergoes the most electrical stress when turning on, and doubly so for any components that also experience physical stresses such as HDDs and fans.
One of the quickest ways to kill a HDD or fan is to make it spin up its motor from idle frequently as a consequence of power saving policies.
Personally, I never turn my computers off unless I know I won't be using them for extended periods of time (say a week or two). The power bill savings aren't worth the decreased hardware life.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago> The power bill savings aren't worth the decreased hardware life. For consumer usage I find this hard to believe. I only use my laptop/desktop's spinning disks like 2h a day at most. Then there are hybrid disks or systems that are likely sleeping the disks when use is infrequent.
- Dalewyn 4y agoLet me put it this way: I have a ~12 year old (110,651 power on hours), 500GB PATA Maxtor/Seagate HDD with 135 power cycles. It's still alive and kicking ass as we speak.
- IIsi50MHz 4y agoHmm, I think we need more evidence to decide which tradeoffs we're making. I have four 1990s drives with thousands of power cycles, still fully functional. And one more from the same time period that failed about 8 years ago. (( Why do I have these? Well, because they're SCSI or SCSI II, which the hosts support. And because I've not bothered to replace the drives with solid-state hacks that put SD cards on the same interface. ))
- justsomehnguy 4y agoIn my life life of L1 tech I had replaced too many HDDs to count. Sure, the main problem was the subpar PSUs, but are you sure what your PSU is enough?
- Someone 4y agoI don’t see how that addresses the claim “The power bill savings aren't worth the decreased hardware life.” It might even be the case that, if you bought a replacement six years ago and kept that powered on 24/7, you would have ended up paying less in (hardware+power).
- Dalewyn 4y agoYeah, but it's one more hard drive in the trash. Besides, it's not this hard drive anyway. At this point I want to see how long this wizard of a hard drive will keep running.
- timthorn 4y agoGiven we're talking of After Dark times, don't forget to run park before turning the machine off :)