Re: HDD general (was: RE: HDD clicking)
On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 02:40:16PM -0800, Paul Johnson wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 02:49:29PM -0500, Narins, Josh wrote:
> > 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?
>
> If it's a desktop box, don't worry about letting them spin down at
> all, your speakers probably draw more power than your hard drive. If
> you *really* want to save power, look at the dpms options in xset to
> turn your monitor off after a couple minutes.
Think the question was about wearing out the HD mechanically, rather
than saving power. With a desktop, it's hardly worth it. Maybe set to
spin down after half an hour or so. Desktop drives are designed to run
for long periods.
> > 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?
>
> Let it spin when you're plugged in, since it's not like you're burning
> battery right then.
Laptop HDs are designed to start and stop a lot, so here it's a power
issue. There's a fair amount of energy stored in the spinning platter,
which is lost when you spin down, so spinning it up consumes more juice
than leaving it running if the off periods are too short. 25 seconds
seems a bit quick to me, maybe 2-5 minutes would be better.
Pigeon
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