Some folks may tell you that keeping the drive spinning constantly is a
bad thing.  Some folks may tell you that spinning it up and down every day
or multiple times a day is even worse than keeping it spinning.

If you look at some of the manufacturers specs, it just doesn't matter.
Mean time to failure for a decent disk drive these days is longer than you
will have that computer for.

I'm sure people out there will have horror stories for you, but here is my
data point.

I never turn my machines off at work.  I take that back, I have shut them
down maybe three or four times a year.  They are not set for power saving
mode.  None of the people I work with ever shut down their machines.  We
are talking about hundreds of drives spinning constantly for months at a
time with shutdowns of minutes three or four times a year.  I don't know
of any of my co-workers who have lost a drive.

Statistically, the chance of you wearing out your drive just because it is
spinning, is pretty low.  If you were doing massive amounts of data
manipulation, file reading and writing 24 hours a day, I could see getting
a failure once every year or two.  And that would be a head failure, not a
spindle failure.

So, don't worry about keeping your machine running.  You aren't going to
wear it out just because the drive is spinning.

Later.



 On Fri, 31 Jan 2003, morey Worthington wrote:

> Howdy all,
> Is there a definitive answer on whether to shut off a computer when not in
> use for a period of time, like 7-8 hours?
> Basically I do not use it from 9 at night till 4 in the morning.. Also, is
> there the same kind of answer about leaving the screen reader program loaded
> if the computer is left on for that same period of time?
> It seems that there is not a positive one way or the other.
> Any input appreciated.
> Thanks,
> Morey
>
>
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--
Blue skies.
Dan Rossi
Carnegie Mellon University.
E-Mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel:    (412) 268-9081


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
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