Like title says, what kind of influence power up/down have on the life span of nowadays hard drives ?

My hard drive is usually powered up/down about five times a day, but having suffered a device failure I was wondering if it's better to avoid to power down the hd for "short" periods, like an hour of inactivity.

Googling around many people say that this is not a problem with modern hard drives, other say that at power up the device suffer mechanical and electrical stress.

Any suggestion is welcomed.

I've got a 120gb hard drive that is allways on in my PC for over 6 years, nothing wrong with it, "touch wood."

But I am worried about the Samsung HM100UI hard drive I use to store movies on. I've had it for over a year and its working fine, but I hear this drive has lots of firmware problems. I wonder if its the power down and power up that corrupts the ROM chip and if there is anything I can do to copy the ROM data in case it does fail, and I can give it to any DR company to restore the chip.

Shane

i seen drives with start/stop count very high(4000 times) and power on days 400 or less and most of them developed bad sectors and SMART errors, even PCB fried

at the same time i have drives with power on time 1300 days , start/stop count 500 times and they are 100% Health, no errors , no bad sectors , nothing wrong

Depends on how good your power supply is. I only go for the highest quality, even after five years my power supply wore out, but it did not damage anything in the pc...

Shane

An UPS (Uninterruptible power supply) it`s good for protecting the PSU and giving the whole computer more life span. Even if the battery dies after 2 years, it`s cheap to replace, but u get the 110 or 220 V stabilized gooing in the PSU all the time .

Of course the PSU will wear out after a couple of years , mainly cuz of electrolytic capacitors life cicle, but if u have the tools and know some basic electronics , u can change them after 2-3 years and u get the PSU back to life ( the other components in the PSU don't wear out like capacitors do )

It`s easyer to prevent then to fix damage done by a PSU gooing bad

Just one question, how can you tell if electrolytic capacitors are failing without opening the unit after a few years? is there a tell?

1st check the voltages in BIOS
U can look inside the unit without opening , trough the vents with a flashlight

But 9 out of 10 times caps go bad in a PSU more quick then theyre life cicle due to high temperature inside .
For me if the PSU is out of waranty i open it for a clean-up and i check the caps then

more info on caps and how to check them can be found on

badcaps.net

Hi,
common symptom of failing electrolytic caps are:
1. unit is around 4 years old or more, and the PC has been usually turned on most of this time. This is a PC that is very susceptible to bad caps(though in itself not a definite).

2. The PC "crashes" sometimes for "no reason", or windows programs crash. Again, not a definite but can be one place to look.

3. You can sometimes smell the capacitor after it fails

4. Installing windows gives a bluescreen, windows has errors while installing fresh when there should be no reason for it to do so.

basically, if the PC starts to have issues then look at the caps to at least see if they are bad or rule them out. There are 2 spots to look at - the larger capacitors near the CPU for any bulging or leaking. this usually makes the PC act up. and the second place is inside the power supply. This usually totally shuts the PC down or makes it so it won't boot.

PC Mainboards have voltage quality detection circuits. If the Mainboard detects the voltage coming from the power supply does not stabalise or is out of spec, it won't give the all clear to continue booting.

At work I have a whole Lab of 28 pc's where all the Mainboards have bad caps starting to show. They were bought in 2008, but a lot of corporate IT equipment because of standard models being offered for a fairly long time means that they could be up to 6 months older than that.

In a nutshell, Electrolytics are there to stabalise and filter power. The symptoms is of course unstable power.

HTH.

Cheers

HaQue