[mythtv-users] 30 minute freezups

Greg Woods greg at gregandeva.net
Fri Dec 19 18:37:26 UTC 2008


On Fri, 2008-12-19 at 11:50 -0600, Carl Fongheiser wrote:

> I think you're tilting at windmills here.  At least where I live, it
> costs about 1 cent a day to let a hard drive spin at idle.

Power cost isn't really the major issue. I'm more worried about drive
lifetime. Even the cost of a new drive isn't the major problem, it's the
major hassle involved in pulling the system out of the rack,
disconnecting and reconnecting all the cables, opening it up, and
replacing a drive, plus losing those recordings. My time to do that is
worth way more than a year of electricity to run a hard drive. I know
that spinning up and down is more stressful per second than just letting
it run, but the truth is that my Myth system is only in use perhaps 4-5
hours a day on average, including recordings (more on weekends when
there are football games, less during the week when the system might be
idle for several days). I have not, as you say, "done the math", but I
have to believe that I'm better off having the drives idle for 19-20
hours a day than having them run all the time. Heat generation is also a
factor, especially in the summer.


>   You're likely to do a lot
> better trying to get your CPU to clock down when it's idle.  This is
> especially true if you're using a processor like a Prescott Pentium 4.

That is exactly what I do have and I should definitely look into that.

--Greg




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