Jim Morgan wrote:
> Sorry about your drive. I was wondering how often you start it up.
>
> Some saw it is better to leave them on all or most of the time. I leave m=
ine
> on almost all the time while my wife turns hers off nightly.
>
> Nither of us has had a drive failure, but we upgrade every couple of year=
s
> so the drives really don't run all that long.
The last actual drive failure I had was when I was using a Mac Plus.
Quite a long while ago. I have drives still in service that are 8-10
years old, though everything in my machine is now less than two years
old. I have had a few failures where a directory got corrupted too, but
the disk was fine when reformatted. Quantum drives are some of the most
durable made, and I've used them for many years, but even the best can
fail. I mostly replace drives to gain capacity. But with 5 72 gig drives
on my G4 (was 3 internal, 2 external, now 3 internal, 1 external after
moving one inside to replace the failed one) I'm up to quite a capacity.
I expect I'll replace the failed drive with the same size.
I keep mine running a lot. I may put the machine to sleep at night in
warmer weather particularly, and had it programmed to shut down for a
half hour at 4 AM, to insure the system got reloaded (that cuts buildup
of errors in memory). These actions also gave the disks a chance to cool
somewhat, they get fairly warm running constantly. But, they never
cooled completely. What may have done this one in finally is that my son
was shutting down my computer after getting my email downloaded each day
this last week. That gave the disk a chance to fully cool each time.
Putting the machine to sleep puts everything low power, but does not
completely shut the machine down. The components that keep running keep
the internal temp slightly warmer than otherwise.
Macs are not near as hot inside as PC's, but with three high cap disks
inside I have a aux vent fan on the case to cut the heat a bit. It's
nowhere near the rated temp levels for the disks.
Running absolutely continuously does have some risks that when, for some
reason you do shut down the bearings will fail suddenly. On the other
hand others have reported that frequent shutdowns were hard on the
bearings too.
Only in service in a highly active enterprise class server is there
normally any problem with the rest of the mechanical parts of a HD.
Though I hate software that flogs the HD a lot. The Quantum drives I use
are one of the choice drives for such servers.
All boils down to trying to keep things backed up. And paying a little
closer attention to the noise. The bearings did give some warning,
though not seriously noisy.
When I finally completely give up on recovery, I'll probably take the
disk apart and see what actually failed. I did pop the seal already, and
no metal shavings or anything like that evident. So, I know it's not heads.
Walt
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