A general question
 

Hi everybody

I haven't been here for a long time. Today I have a question.

Someone told me the hard drives don't spin when you are away from the computer for more than 20 or 30 minutes.
It was my understanding that the hard drives spins when the power is on whether you are away from the computer.

Is this true in Linux? I run Mandriva most of the time nowadays. Sometimes I run Ubuntu too.
I think Windows has a built in sleep mode.

Nowadays I run Mandriva most of the time.
Your thoughts are welcome.

It depends no your power settings, hard drives can be made to 'spin down' after a certain amount of inactivity.

Thanks for the reply.
How do I change the power settings in order to achieve the sleeping mode?

Look at the menu entry System - Preferences - System - Power management.

Thanks David
Do you think default settings have ample scope for the power saving or rather to put the system into sleeping mode when you are away for a long time?

The default settings are pretty fair usually. I'm personally not a fan of having my drives spin down.

Our friend rweaver says he doesn't care about shutting down the rotation of the hard drives when he is away from the computers for a long time.

I think you increase the longevity of the hard drive by disallowing to rotate. Am I wrong here?

Yes and No
It depend on the construction of you're drive and where it is made for.

HDD has its own controlle system. I worked on ATA interface, CPU doesnt read write data on the HDD like RAM, its communicates through HDD interface, which communicate to the HDD controller. HDD controller is responsible for reading and writting data and rotation of moters. All the data is read and write sector by sector. when there is need of read and write, CPU communicates through ATA interface, interface sets commands for reading writing operation, interface waits till busy system of HDD, after that it reads and writes complete sector. HDD moter works only for read and write opeartion on sectors and trackes and head.
Read/write operation is usually done when you are getting data, applicaion is getting data, OS is getting data, or for pagging. othere wise there is no operation on moters.

Absolutely it can, but a drive failure is likely not going to be the end of your drive... time will be. I've got 20g drives and 80g drives I have no use for sitting around. I don't even use the interface they're on any more (old eide/ide and scsi-2 and now I'm using sata and ultra-320). I typically buy drives with a 3 or 5 year warranty and run them in a mirrored raid, so I rarely run the risk of losing data (and I back up on top of it to be safe) In my experience a drive will fail either in the first 3 months of operation or after 5 years even when in constant use. If you're keeping the same drives for >5 years on a desktop... if you just got done with an upgrade cycle and bought new drives today your previous drive would have likely been an eide (sata was out but not in popular use) in the <150gb range. The standards are moving fast, even a sata drive from several years ago isn't a drive I'd put in a new computer because of the difference in the sata interface (1/2).

You have a higher chance of your video, power, motherboard, or ram failing in 5 years than the drive in my experience, although I can't yet speak for the longevity of the solid state drives.

ronlau wrote the following:

Yes and No
It depend on the construction of you're drive and where it is made for.
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I think all hard drives are rotten. It doesn't matter whether it is Seagate or IBM. They go to hell.
If it happens within the warranty period, you could send it to the manufacturer.

They are in the Netherlands. I did this almost a year ago. They never send a new hard drive. They sent me a refurbished one. It went to hell in 6 months.

I talk to them on the phone and begged to send a brand new one just after sending the broken hard drive. They didn't oblige to me.


[ If your hard drive is damaged, just go to the manufacturer's home page and find out the guarantee period. It will ask you to write all the numbers written on the hard drive.]
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To be candid, I have some difficulty in understanding what Shoail says here.