Michael Bacarella writes:
> Why is this even desirable?
>From what I've read, most of the cheaper "desktop" drives aren't designed
to run for ever, unlike those for servers (or IBM would have you believe
this). However, there are two figures from the drive spec that come
into play - the MTBF and the number of spin up/down cycles that the
drive can withstand. (With marketing of hard drives these days as it
is, do you think you can really find the truth about this out there? ;()
If anyone does know the definitive answer, I'd be interested to know!
There are also the environmental (noise) reasons as well.
> Wouldn't you want the drives to just spin forever? I always understood
> that spinning something down and then spinning it back up is what causes
> them to degrade/die. The analogy would be that a car that runs it's engine
> for 10 years straight never needs major repairs, whereas one that is
> turned on, driven, turned off, repeat, will be slowly destroyed.
That is actually misleading. An engine which runs for a decent amount
of time (eg, 1 hour a day) can last 10 years without major repairs.
The period that it lasts has more to do with how the car is driven
than how often it is stopped/started.
_____
|_____| ------------------------------------------------- ---+---+-
| | Russell King rmk@arm.linux.org.uk --- ---
| | | | http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/~rmk/aboutme.html / / |
| +-+-+ --- -+-
/ | THE developer of ARM Linux |+| /|\
/ | | | --- |
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jul 31 2000 - 21:00:32 EST