[vdr] Re: Commands executed in connection with timers

["William E. Mrozinski" <wem@dcshome.com>]

Wow, this is just not true.  All hard drive mechanisms manufactured in last few
years are designed to meet or exceed 150,000 hour MTBF ( mean time between
failure ) ( most of the newest are rated at 300,000 hours! ), the type of
interface is irrelevant to the physical mechanism behaviors.  Thats 17+ years of
CONSTANT use at the 150,000 hour level. The only wear stress they experience is
during the power up or down cycles.  The surest way to kill a hard drive ( SCSI
or IDE ) is to spin it up and down frequently. Spin e'm up and leave e'm spin!
Its almost impossible to hear a hard drive spinning unless you place your ear
directly on top of it.  The noise you hear is the cpu and/or power supply
fan(s).  These have nothing to do with the hard drive.  Buy a quality power
supply and cpu fan and you'll never feel the urge to destroy your vdr box
again.  Whether SCSI or IDE, the physical platter mechanisms are almost always
the same, off the same assembly lines; only the interface board itself differs.
The ability to spin hd's up and down was a reaction by manufacturers to power
consumption issues ( sleep mode ).  The first thing I do to every computer I've
set up over the last several years is to disable power management in the BIOS
and OS drivers.  What you save in power costs spinning up and down hard drives
frequently, you'll lose in frequent replacement of failed hard drives(g)...  I
haven't seen a 'real' hard drive failure on any machine I've supported since the
early 90's.  I seen a lot of OS and software problems labeled as hard drive
crashes though by very poor technicians.  Its usually a ploy to sell more hard
drives or an excuse to erase the OS and start over clean because they are
incapable of finding the real software issue and correcting that instead.

    Bill Mrozinski

"Rienecker, Fa. Evenio, ITS P, M" wrote:

> >
> > EN> On Tue, 18 Sep 2001 18:37:03 +0100, Mathias Born
> > EN> <mborn@faphida.in-berlin.de> wrote:
> >
> > >> But it makes the disk QUIET which is the most important
> > aspect in my
> > >> case.
> >
> > EN> Yes, it is absolut silent after the disk has died. ;-)
> >
> > The HD will not die due to some spin up/downs more. The same happens
> > when switching the machine on or off.
> >
> > But it will die when I throw a stone at it because I cannot stand the
> > noise any longer :-)
>
> Actually there is a significant difference between IDE and SCSI HDD's
> nowadays (besides the interface):
>
> SCSI disks are made to run permanantly. Lifetime suffers from regular
> spin-ups and -downs.
> IDE disks are made for end user PC's running from time to time only.
> Lifetime suffers from running permantly. They are made to spin up and down a
> lot.
> Actually, the best would be to run the system in ramdisk and use the HD only
> for /video, i.e. recording and replaying.
> And if you are still unsure: Use a notbook HDD they especially are made for
> heavy duty spin-up and down ( in order to save power).
>
> CR.