At 10:13 AM 2/7/00 +1300, you wrote:
>Under Windoze, after 20 minutes of idle time, my hard drive would obediently
>spin-down into a power-saving state. This does not seem to be the case with
>linux (I have another computer (Redhat) with the same problem.)
Bad. Spin-up and spin-down are the real source of wear and tear on fixed
disks, not disk writes and reads. Modern floppies are in dustproof
dust-gated shock-resistant hard cases. They fail frequently, but HDD's only
rarely. Why's this? Some of it is because with HDDs lots of attention goes
into quality. But a lot is wear and tear... a floppy spins up and down once
each for every time it's mounted. So does a hard drive. But a floppy might
get used very frequently, and mounted repeatedly. A hard drive might only
power cycle once a week, or even less often, in a desktop box. Even when
you reboot, unless it's a full power down and up, the hard disks tend not
to spin down and back up. And if treated right, i.e. no messing around with
magnets near the box, and such, they work perfectly for years, usually
being lost when you upgrade the box instead of because of a crash. But this
doesn't apply if it spins up and down regularly.
Of course, laptop HDDs are, in higher quality models, probably designed to
withstand extra wear and tear to give similar reliability rates in these
cases to PC hdds (as measured in terms of mean time between failures).
Which leads naturally to...
>My Mandrake computer is an Acer Extensa 390c notebook, perchased in New
>Zealand. (Cheap piece of crap)
Somehow, I don't think your hdd is specially designed for extra wear and
tear imposed by frequent spindown and spinup, let alone changes in
orientation while in use. Uh-oh.
Most times when a friend or family member complains about a disk crash, it
turns out to be in either a used computer or a laptop. In the latter case
it's sometimes only a few months old.
Maybe an upgrade of your notebook to a higher quality (and unfortunately
probably more expensive) model would be good. Until then, make lots of
backups... and don't, for heaven's sake, use floppies. :-)
>I would like to leave it going all the time, but without this
>hardware-saving feature, I'm reluctant to do so.
Battery-saving, actually, and at the expense of the hardware itself,
eventually...
--
.*. "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not
-() < circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a
`*' straight line." -------------------------------------------------
-- B. Mandelbrot |http://surf.to/pgd.net [EMAIL PROTECTED]
_____________________ ____|________ Paul Derbyshire
Programmer & Humanist|ICQ: 10423848|
