Re: HDD general (was: RE: HDD clicking)
Narins, Josh said:
> Dear Debian users,
> How do I calculate the difference in "cost to hard drive wear
> and tear from a single spin-up" to the cost of letting it run for a length
> of time?
this would probably vary depending on what kind of disk. So it's very
difficult to calculate.
> If that didn't make sense, I'll say I set the spindown time on
> my laptop's HD to 25 seconds. Generally I'll have one disk spin for each
> app that I load the first time, and one or two other spins for an "ls" or
> such in a new directory.
> Would I just be better off having it spin a lot when I am
> plugged in?
I would set disk spin down to no less then 60 seconds. Unless your disk
can stay spun down. Try to aim to keeping the drive spinning up less then
once per 2 minutes. Preferably less then once per 10 minutes. So if thats
the way your laptop works now then 25 seconds is fine ...
laptop drives are much better about spinning down then desktop drives,
they also run slower and in general run cooler so they are more durable.
I recently had to power off 2 old IDE drives that had been running 24/7
for nearly 2 years, but they had a good deal of cooling, and to my
suprise when I powered them on 10 hours later(long power outage), they
worked perfectly. I still migrated all data to a new SCSI disk for better
performance but the drives did work(maxtor). I had a seagate IDE drive
take a shit in an ultra 10 about 2 years ago, it had been running 24/7
for 3 months. Powered it off for about 30 minutes, and it never powered
on again(drive wouldn't spin up at all). The maxtor drives in the above
situation were actually RMA'd drives so they were probably refurbished,
maxtor makes some good stuff(at least compared to IBM IDE). I did get
a couple bad sectors on one of the disks about 10 months ago but the
system never hiccuped.
I run reiserfs on my laptop so my drive pretty much never spins down,
I'm gonna reinstall soon, ordered a new larger disk for my laptop which
should be here today and I'm gonna play around with ext3 or revert to
ext2.
nate
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