MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Re: About always-on

> > > Turning a computer on and off regularly is bad for it
> > > ...switching a machine on/off puts stress on the harddrives, that's for sure. But
> > > also it's not a good idea to let your machine run 24/5 or so, because consumer
> > drives
> > > are not designed for this too.
> >
> > So what if you happen to be a PleasureDome junkie? Or otherwise a torrent-junkie?
> > Just grit your teeth and maintain backups while keeping a budget to replace drives
> > and other failed components regularly?
>
>
> Dunno. I would myself not describe as a torrent junkie, but i use utorrent quite
> often. Never had a failed drive in my Raid 0+1 array, though. But the msot that i
> leave my machine(s) on is for let's say 5 days. More often i just shut them down
> after 24-48h.

From an experience standpoint:

I run both a development server and my personal PC 24/7. Have been running PC's this way since the 386 days. Generally the power supplies are the only point of failure if you keep everything well ventilated. I haven't had a drive failure since the early '00s. I do upgrade motherboards and such every 3-5 years, and I'll rotate a new hard drive in the mix every so often and remove the oldest.

From a technical standpoint:

As long as you can keep the temperature semi-consistent, it isn't going to matter which route you go. The only components that will suffer drastically from long term consistent use are the capacitors, and cooling fans. If you go quality on both of those often you won't see an issue throughout a reasonable life cycle.

You aren't going to power cycle your equipment enough to damage it either, so if on/off is your bag, go with it. You might ~notice~ a cap failure quicker with this route though, as component related issues will effect a startup condition a considerable amount of time before than they would kill a steady state.

Also it's not so much USE that kills a hard disk, as it is things like dust, smoke, heat, moisture, power fluctuations, and vibrations.