That really depends on what you do with it. Does it need to run programs 24/7 or just have the programs open but "sleeping". If you need the computer to perform work 24/7 it can't go into standby mode. If you need to access the hard drive 24/7, you can't spin the hard drive down. Like I said, it all depends what you are doing with it.
I usu shut down my PC's so that their RAM gets "flushed"--often times, some programs will not release memory even after they are closed, right? Is there a way of doing that without rebooting PC's? Thanks in advance.
I was good friends with a hardware engineer who was part of the development team for a variety of Maxtor drives. He explained that all hard drives must fail, it's not a question of "if", only a matter of "when". Reason being part of their design uses an extremely hard metal pivot bearing that slowly wears out due to the high rotational speed (7200/10000 rpm) . Because of the confined sealed space and the high generated temperatures engineers can't use lubricants as they would simply vaporize and possibly contaminate the drive platter(s). This is why all hard drives are rated in MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure), meaning they know it's going to fail and xxx hours is about the time, on average, it should last. With that said there's a tradeoff in turning your computer on/off vs. leaving it on all the time. If you turn it on/off the main "shock" to the system is not simply the mechanics of the hard drive but the electronics in the motherboard, power supply, CPU, etc. In contrast, if you leave it on all the time you prevent the "shock" to the system but you add wear to the hard drive (and, incidentally, all your cooling fans) by using up hours of its MTBF. Maybe, as some have suggested, powering down the hard drive is an alternate approach. Personally, because hard drives are so cheap, I keep my systems well backed up and turned on all the time with, of course, monitors turned off when I'm not using them (as even LCD panels have backlights that burn out over time). BTW, the moral of this story, whether you choose to always leave your PC on or not, is to back up religiously. Otherwise, if you put it off, if you never quite get around to doing it, I can assure you that when your hard drive craps out and your lose all your data, software configurations, etc. you will get religion.
I just lost a drive yesterday. Thankfully it was backed up. I am currently having a nightmare of a time getting a new 750 GB SATA drive to work in my UATA computer. Three PCI cards which are meant to handle this have all failed thusfar to do the job. Does anyone know how much money it costs to run a PC per hour? I've always been curious. I'm about to switch to 24 hour runtime.
I just answered my own question. According to the net, only 36 cents per day for an average computer to run hard for 24 hours a day: (150 Watts * 24 hours * $0.10prkWh)/1000 = $0.36
RAID 1 for mirroring. Absolutely essential, especially since a lot of new computers have it built in.
Just remember, RAID is not designed for backup, it is designed for performance and availability. If your data is important you should do real backups as well. Martin
Not sure where you're coming from. A real-time backup of every single piece of data that you have, is an excellent protection against a hard drive crash. Now if you're talking about the destruction of the computer itself, taking out both drives that's a different story.
SATA has a greater throughput *potential*, but in reality the actual computing performance of SATA and PATA is virtually identical. Adding a PCI card to run SATA on a PATA controller machine is mostly unrewarded.
Absolutely. You better make sure though that you have an adequate fire alarm system to keep watch. Computer fires happen.