Continuous running of desktop pc - advisable?

custardy

i was quantifying that i didnt suffer shortened life.
eg my mobo developed a fault after 3+ years.to me thats a good lifespan for a pc component

unfortunatly ive seen this raised on many forums and you will never get a definitive answer

LuciferTDark

3 years is p*ss poor if you ask me, my first pc was 10 years old when I blew the motherboard while upgrading the soundcard.

isofa

The more a hard disc spins up and down, the lower it's life expectancy - generally.

I quote below from: http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/qual/specCycles.html

"Each time the drive starts and stops a small amount of wear occurs to the heads and also to other components such as the spindle motor. For this reason, hard drives are given a specification for the minimum number of start/stop cycles they are designed to handle during their service life. The value for a desktop drive is typically between 30,000 and 50,000 cycles (and remember that this is not an average, but a minimum). Notebook drives, which are more commonly spun up and down a great deal to save battery power, usually have even higher numbers."

Full article at: http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/qual/specLife.html

As for life expectancy of machines, I have a Mac Quadra 840av from 1992 which still functions fine, 15 years after I purchased it. Rarely used nowadays, but it still works fine.

Jolanta_Nowak

isofa wrote: »

The more a hard disc spins up and down, the lower it's life expectancy - generally.

I quote below from: http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/qual/specCycles.html

"Each time the drive starts and stops a small amount of wear occurs to the heads and also to other components such as the spindle motor. For this reason, hard drives are given a specification for the minimum number of start/stop cycles they are designed to handle during their service life. The value for a desktop drive is typically between 30,000 and 50,000 cycles (and remember that this is not an average, but a minimum). Notebook drives, which are more commonly spun up and down a great deal to save battery power, usually have even higher numbers."

Full article at: http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/qual/specLife.html

As for life expectancy of machines, I have a Mac Quadra 840av from 1992 which still functions fine, 15 years after I purchased it. Rarely used nowadays, but it still works fine.

Let me get that right: one 'cycle' = one boot up/down? On that basis, the OP's requirement for only 200 per year is vastly exceeded and he's well within limits.

superscaper

Anecdotally I've noticed no difference between computers switched off and on all the time, computers switched off and on occasionally and computers switched on all the time in terms of amount of hardware failure. The amount of actual degradation would seem small to me to make an appreciable difference to the actual lifespan of a component. And the expected lifespans of components taking into account stresses and unstable bias should still be plenty long enough anyway. I've seen a few components fail due to overheating or because they were inherently faulty but I can't remember any failing for no "apparent" reason, i.e. boot cycles.

isofa

Complete concur with superscaper.

Smirch_This

It makes no difference other than power consumption and the amount of "grey fluff" that you have to scrape out periodically.

Hard disk spin up and down during normal operation (if there is no disk IO for a while Windows will put the disk to sleep). Drive bearings usually sieze if anything but that's a historical thing - new hard disks last a lot longer, usually longer than the machines they are in.

custardy

LuciferTDark wrote: »

3 years is p*ss poor if you ask me, my first pc was 10 years old when I blew the motherboard while upgrading the soundcard.

mine developed a hardware usb error.well documented fault on the mobo model however everything else is still running

imaginer

As for life expectancy of machines, I have a Mac Quadra 840av from 1992 which still functions fine, 15 years after I purchased it. Rarely used nowadays, but it still works fine.[/QUOTE]

Hi... do you want to sell the 840av?


Scott

old_codger1

I might have mentioned this before but I ran a PC rental company for nearly 20 years. At on time we had over 2000 PC's on rental. Also, a friend of mine was the head service engineer for the old ACL, (or whatever it was called), of Birmingham who provided maintenance for about 200,000 PC's and it's pretty well known that you get more failures during the winter, (when it's cold and damp in the morning... particularly in offices that aren't heated 24 hrs a day), than the summer.

So the question arises, how do you maintain PC components at a steady temperature and keep then dry? I'd suggest keeping them turned on is a pretty good way

Having said that I sometimes turn mine off nowadays but that's usually because the little women has maundered about leaving it on