Wi fi router

MattMattMattUK

ZolaBuddy said:

Working in IT I would be inclined to leave your router on 24/7.

Repeated switching it off and on again will cause problems further down the road and this also applies to PCs and laptops and NAS boxes that some people suggest switching off at night.

The problem is that it causes undue wear on hard drives that will eventually cause the device to fail.

Hardly any modern PC or Laptop has a hard drive in it now. In the context of a NAS I agree, but they are pretty rate in home usage. 

k_man

MattMattMattUK said:

ZolaBuddy said:

Working in IT I would be inclined to leave your router on 24/7.

Repeated switching it off and on again will cause problems further down the road and this also applies to PCs and laptops and NAS boxes that some people suggest switching off at night.

The problem is that it causes undue wear on hard drives that will eventually cause the device to fail.

Hardly any modern PC or Laptop has a hard drive in it now. In the context of a NAS I agree, but they are pretty rate in home usage. 

People are still allowed to have PCs and laptops that are a few years old.
I suspect more than 75% of laptops and PCs in home have HDDs

k_man

But even then, they should still be shutdown when not in use. Just not at the mains without shutting down first!

pochase

Even if there would be a problem with shutting down PCs every night - which it is not in 99.9%, how much is it to upgrade a HDD to a SDD. 512GB is below 50£ against the £154£ additional electricity use a user just claimed.

k_man

There really is no problem turning of PCs/laptops with HDDs overnight (or whenever not used).
Are we thinking everyone has always left their PCs and laptops on all the time until SSDs were invented?

Astria

Workerdrone said:

Astria said:

Silverbird65 said:

Thanks I realise that it was just a suggestion from Martin regarding router energy consumption I read.

It still stands depending on how you use your router. For example, if you only ever have laptop/phone/tablet connected and work during the day then turning the router off between midnight and 18:00 will save quite a bit of energy and shouldn't upset things too much. t could be possible that it could fail earlier than if you left it on 24/7 however, but if it's ISP provided then they will replace (but it could take a week without connectivity).

Afraid not. The DSLAM at the exchange/street cabinet will interpret a sudden loss of connection as a link loss. Multiple link losses will force the DSLAM to retrain to a lower speed on next connection as it will assume the line is unstable at the higher speed. If you do this often enough your broadband will drop to a crawl. Ive seen a lot of this with broadband in older peoples houses where they can't get out of the habit of turning everything off on a night time.

I found my ADSL router was quite unstable after a few weeks so I had it on a timer so that it rebooted the router every day by turning the power off for 1 minute and then turning it back on - it never caused any problems. In fact it sometimes did the opposite - during the night it would often drop from 7 mbps to 4 mbps (typically after the street lights come on strangely enough - interference?) and it kept this speed in the day unless I power cycled it in which case it returned to 7 mbps.

This happened until one day it dropped to 2 mbps and didn't reset - BT did a "DSLAM reset" which didn't do anything and ended up saying a few weeks it was a cable fault which would be "too costly" to fix.

Ally_E.

pochase said:

Even if there would be a problem with shutting down PCs every night - which it is not in 99.9%, how much is it to upgrade a HDD to a SDD. 512GB is below 50£ against the £154£ additional electricity use a user just claimed.

I miscalculated, it's actually £264 to keep a PC overnight.

BUFF

They should go to sleep or standby though & one would probably at least switch off the monitor(s) so I imagine that's worst case scenario.
My laptop is pretty much "on" 24/7 & even so at current SVR rates my total household annual electricity unit usage will cost ~ £335 (the standing charge will add another ~£170 but that is whether a laptop/PC is running or not).

ZolaBuddy

MattMattMattUK said:

ZolaBuddy said:

Working in IT I would be inclined to leave your router on 24/7.

Repeated switching it off and on again will cause problems further down the road and this also applies to PCs and laptops and NAS boxes that some people suggest switching off at night.

The problem is that it causes undue wear on hard drives that will eventually cause the device to fail.

Hardly any modern PC or Laptop has a hard drive in it now. In the context of a NAS I agree, but they are pretty rate in home usage. 

Surprisingly some of my customers still have old SFFs with 512G or 1T HDDs purely for gaming or media centre storage. A lot of them can't be bothered with SSDs despite all the advantages.
I would agree tin with SSDs are far more durable against failure, but if people are concerned about saving power, especially at night, then setting up a quick script in Windows Terminal or Task Scheduler to shut the box down at a certain time is a must.

Benny2020

I have 3 x 8TB hard drives and a 14TB hard drive connected to my laptop, where am i going to get that kind of storage space with SSD's?