PC always on

[vital-analitix]

Quote from romik:

i haven't experienced a blue screen since windows XP came about. Also, the matter of overheating due to dust, that can happen 5 minutes after the PC is first switched on, it does not take long to heat up. Your PC has been overheating, perhaps, because there has been little internal maintenance on your behalf, can't really blame you as most retail users are told that opening the case will result in warranty being cancelled, BUT internal maintenance is just as important as external, if not more IMHO.

Neither have I had a BSOD since the advent of Win2000 but Win2000 was a bit more picky about drivers.

Agree on the internal maintenance. Was not a problem in laptops when they did not have fans (the good ol' day's) but nowadays it is even worse than desktops. Particularly when they are carried around a lot in briefcases with lunch in the same compartment.

vital analitics

 

[vital-analitix]

Quote from lwlee:

RAID 1 for mirroring. Absolutely essential, especially since a lot of new computers have it built in.

Be careful here. RAID-1 is a nomenclature which is often misused.

RAID-1 is striped across two hard disks. If one goes out you miss half of your data and you'll have to reinstall.

There are those who call disk mirroring RAID-1. But diskmirroring is exactly that: it holds on the second disk an exact copy of the first HD. This can also lead to a small performance improvement because you can read from the one hard disk and at the same time write to the other. And then when things quieten down they sync again.

But the best performance increase is with RAID-5 (or more HD) where you have basically 4HD holding the data and the 5th with a control number so that when one craps out you can rebuild that one from data held on the other four while the machine is running.

True (striped) RAID-1 in home environment is useless IMHO (and obsolete).

If you have ever worked in an environment where the number of spindles (HD's) was important (rather than capacity) then you'll understand the importance of this. By the time you get big network storage HD arrays you start to get close to solid state performance provided the bandwidth from CPU / Memory to HD can handle it. I worked in places where there were mulitple CPU's with multiple datapaths (NCR Teradata, the old version was one of the best databases there ever was)


vital analitics

 

[winter]

Quote from vital-analitix:

Be careful here. RAID-1 is a nomenclature which is often misused.

Indeed

RAID-1 is striped across two hard disks. If one goes out you miss half of your data and you'll have to reinstall.

There are those who call disk mirroring RAID-1. But diskmirroring is exactly that: it holds on the second disk an exact copy of the first HD. This can also lead to a small performance improvement because you can read from the one hard disk and at the same time write to the other. And then when things quieten down they sync again.

But the best performance increase is with RAID-5 (or more HD) where you have basically 4HD holding the data and the 5th with a control number so that when one craps out you can rebuild that one from data held on the other four while the machine is running.

True (striped) RAID-1 in home environment is useless IMHO (and obsolete).

I think you are confusing Raid0 and Raid1

Raid0 - Data striped across drives. No data redundancy; used to increase performance (or create a large logical drive out of smaller physical drives)

Raid1 - Mirroring, each drive has (at least) one exact mirror image. Has redundancy and read performance increases but very expensive in terms of number of drives required to implement.

Raid5 - Striping with parity. A good balance of performance and redundancy. Can tolerate a single drive failure w/o data loss. Lose two drives and your data is (basically) gone. Since you only need one parity drive per RAID set not as expensive as Raid1 to implement. Write performance is not great since the extra parity data must be written for any write operation.

Raid5 definitely does not have the best performance of all the raid types but since it offers both decent performance and some redundacy (without nearly the overhead of Raid1) it is a favorite.

And of course there are many more RAID types then these 3 available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

 

[vital-analitix]

Quote from winter:

Indeed

I think you are confusing Raid0 and Raid1

winter

Thanks for the corrrection. Just shows relying on memory is not always a good idea, lol. (I have not been working in that arena for over 6 years)

I can remember that at the time I thought that 2 disks in RAID were not very usefull and that RAID-5 were a far better option. But since then NAS has come into vogue but have not personal experience with that.

vital-analitics

 

[glenjohnson]

Quote from romik:

Somebody has told me that it is pretty safe to keep a PC on all the time, in fact he said that keeping it on is better than switching it on and off every day. Is that really so?

Turning your computer on - off too many times can give your computer "chip creek". Chip creek is when the components or chips inside the computer cool off and then heat back up and stretch out the chip holders due to cooling off too many times. I turn mine off once a week. Don't turn your monitor off manually either. Let the computer turn it off for you with the timer, because you can burn out the pixels in the monitor from turning on and off. But it will take years for everything to burn out, so you can probably turn your computer on, off and your monitor on, off as many times as you want, because by the time it all breaks then you will buy a new computer anyways. Most people buy a new computer once every 5 years, then the old one becomes obsolete.

 

[nononsense]

Quote from winter:

Its definitely safe.

Whether its a good idea would depend on your usage pattern, e.g. how often you would turn it on and off if you didnt leave it on all the time.

I would recommend if you do leave it on all the time that you make sure the hard drive is being spun down and the monitor goes into power saver mode (standby mode in Windows is even better).

Having the whole thing on an UPS is a good idea too so it wont suffer from hard resets during minor power fluctuations. Most UPSs come with a cable so that the PC will be automatically shutdown properly before the UPS runs out of power in case you're not around during a non-trivial power outage.

I leave several computers on 24 x 7 at home.

I agree on the condition that your computer is being monitored by a working fire alarm. The power supply is the least reliable component. Otherwise, turn it off if you can't look at it regularly (or smell it).

 

[Gordon Gekko]

Quote from Exodus:

Could someone suggest the best "power settings".

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i don't know the best but my monitor goes off after 15 minutes.. hard drives go off after 1 hour..

???