On 03/27 11:48 , Les Mikesell wrote: > Worry about your air conditioner instead - it has more effect on the > drive life. I've had as much trouble with drives that have been powered > off for much of their lives as ones that stay busy.
as an interesting data point, I have a 512MB drive that ran my firewall for several years, and before that was in a desktop machine at a government office. The date on it is 1993; and it still works just fine, despite what I'm guessing is fairly regular and continuous use since that time. I would really like to see hard drives made to be more reliable, rather than just bigger. (Where the mfg. actually touts the reliability features more than the size). Maxtor sort of tried that a while ago with their single-platter 15GB drives; but AFAIK there wasn't anything special about those other than fewer platters and heads (no better bearings, gas-absorption material, etc). We've long since passed the point where big drives are necessary (at least for OS partitions on Linux boxen). I want reliable storage. to that end, this is kind of an attractive product: http://www.elandigitalsystems.com/adapter/p312.php we've had good luck with these units: http://www.mach5products.com/PRODCF/CFproducts.htm My ~1TB BackupPC server is using less than 1GB on its OS drive (the backuppc data is all on a separate drive array, for ease of management). While consumer-grade CF cards are pretty crappy things compared to the military-grade solid-state IDE or SCSI disks that places like M-Systems sells; they are cheap enough and big enough to compete with spinny storage when the space requirements take second place to the reliability of no moving parts. (I've seen CF cards die... I'm not sure that a spinny drive wouldn't have died in the same conditions tho). -- Carl Soderstrom Systems Administrator Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
