> I lost a hard drive on my firewall machine recently so I looked for ways to > conserve the drive. I enabled power saving(?) in the BIOS so that the IDE > spins down after 5 mins of inactivity. As it is the only machine on a lot of > the time, the HD is rarely used anyway. > Any downside to this, will it cause problesm? Three days in and the machine > seems fine. > <paranoid> there is a downside: every time the disk spins up, it gets a bit "older". ide disks survive many more spin-ups than scsi disks nowadays, but they have their limits, too. </paranoid> however, this number is about 300,000 or something like that (will vary very much from disk to disk). assuming, that the drive spins up 100 times a day, it would work for 10 years. so this should not be an issue.
-- Hi! I'm a .signature virus! Copy me into your ~/.signature, please! -- If Windows is the answer, I want the problems back!
