Is it just an impression, or are PC's not crashing as regularly as they used to?
Looking at the machines here, it seems that this shift occurred roughly around the time IDE HDDs were replaced by SATA.
With three machines, I used to expect to have a clunk HDD at least once a year, if not just cloned to a larger drive.
Haven't had a HDD fail since 2011.
What goes?
RL
John Doe wrote in news:qvht1c$c5r$1@dont- email.me:
Why? "Memory leaks"? Naaah...
I think Windows has been doing pretty good since the Windows 8 to Windows 10 upgrade. Just keep it updated to foil the retarded hacks.
No need really to reboot that I have ever heard.
I sgut my machine off because it chews up juice and dirties up the heat sink tines inside, and laptops are a PITA to keep clean so it runs cool and keeps a long life. My current laptop is a 6 core, 12 pipe Xeon with an Nvidia Quadro GOU, so keeping it cool is a good thing. So I turn it off when I am not using it.
About five years ago I standardized on a Hitachi 1.5 TB drive, and now have about a dozen of them. I had one early failure in a RAID-5 NAS, but they've all been running flawlessly since then. (The failure was in a device used as a hot spare, so I didn't even have to reconstruct the array.)
I have three Supermicro servers with H8DGI-F mobos and dual 12-core AMD Magny Cours processors, and 40 to 64GB of ECCC memory. I had one power supply go mammaries-topmost, but everything else has worked flawlessly.
I like them because they have a lot of grunt (250 GFLOPS), excellent main-memory bandwidth for FDTD electromagnetic sims, legacy BIOS, IOMMU (equivalent to Intel's VTx/VTd) and they don't have anything resembling the Intel management unit backdoor.
They do eat a bit of power though.
For laptops, I have several Thinkpad T4xx units. They have shorter lives than the Supermicros because they get a lot harder use--you don't usually drop servers on the floor and break the display. :(
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 http://electrooptical.net http://hobbs-eo.com
Oh, and they run Qubes OS or CentOS Linux, no Windows at all.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
(Posting from Qubes OS)
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 http://electrooptical.net http://hobbs-eo.com
My guess is that the power grid became more stable. I still have a bunch of PATAs in use. One SATA which often makes a few clicks too many on bootup.
Have not had any HD failure from 1980 to today. Running out of storage space was the main reason to get another set of disks.
Johann Klammer wrote in news:qvi6sj$4c8$1 @gioia.aioe.org:
Well, it sure is NOT because of power grid spike/sag reduction.
That is just plain silly.
Otherwise nations with noisey grids would show huge differences, and they do not.
Power grid spikes/sags are not making it into your PC's rails.
Silliest thing I've heard in a while.
I had five AFAIR. Three were due to harsh traveling (pilot "nailed" it onto the runway et cetera), two were stationary out-of-the-blue failures.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
I've been running my windows 7 computer since 2011. I have never reinstalled windows, I had one crash but is was during a hurricane and had problems on one outlet when we had a power surge. The computer had a minor fix $80, I had a florescent lamp die and a wall wart operated radio die, all on the same outlet. I've been trying to get my buddy that put the parts list together to do it again, I think it's time for a new computer. I saw him this morning, after some research, he says, he may just make a dual boot windows 7 and windows 10 computer. He needs 10 because Turbotax will not work on windows 7 in 2020.
Mikek
Correct. PC's are no longer crashing in regular equally space intervals. Instead, a random number generator has been added to the crash(delay,random_seed), to produce random crashes instead. In some operating systems, these random crashes are part of the update process. The only thing regular about today's PC crashes is that they occur on the 2nd Tues of the month on Windoze machines.
SATA was introduced in about 2000. That would be 11 years of SATA while your hard disk drives were failing. I don't think it's SATA, especially since HDD density and technology has significantly improved in the last 20 years.
The real question is what changed in 2011. My guess(tm) is that the power and noise levels of most PC's and HDD's has decreased to the point where PC's are no longer spinning down the drives to save power and comply with Energy Star requirements. I've had machines with old drives running 24x7 that last far longer than those that get powered on and off. There's also the situation where the replacement cycle, HDD warranty time, and operating system support life, have converged to the same span (about 5 to 7 years). That means that people are replacing machines before they need to replace the HDD.
The opposite of what comes.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Nope: "Windows 7 Support is Ending" TurboTax for tax year 2019 and QuickBooks 2020 will install on Windows 7 (Service Pack 1 or later) PCs.
So it is written, so it must be.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
no it happened in 1995 when I started using linux instead of DOS
I've worn out up two W.D. Green 3TB drives in the media PC (one new, and one warranty replacement), switched to Purple. seems better.
1: real operating systems like Linux and Windows NT 2: more RAM means less swapping means drives see less wear. 3: better engineering.-- Jasen.
...
At a guess, the shakeout in HD manufacturers has removed some of the time-to-market pressure on new motor/head/platter designs, and modeling has improved enough to keep 'em spinning and sensing.
i've opened some failed HD units, and mostly the nonworking ones had power supply shorts. An occasional enthusiastic engineer puts 13V zeners everywhere and either the one in the power supply OR the one on the disk drive fails short. The tolerance on motor power is HUGE, it'd be better to just accept a minor spike, but no, we gotta spend money on a fuse and/or transzorb.
It's a bit tiresome hunting down suppliers for surface mount repair parts, but it keeps my cost/terabyte below two-digit dollars.
Well, now back in the early 1980 daze of the IBM PC XT 5152, the first HD i saw was the MFM Tandon 5 Megabyte hard drive.
And it ran reliably for well over ten years; still working when i replaced it with Quantum which lasted maybe 3 years then crashed.
So one could say the reliability went clunk when the interface advanced from MFM to IDE.
Hmm, I'll blame that on my breakfast buddy, that was the topic on Monday morning. He was talking about upgrading to 10, because he uses Turbotax. His solution is a dual boot using two separate Hard Drives. He wants 7 because he has photo printer that only has 7 drivers, and ham equipment that will only run on 7. I've been trying to get him to build a new computer, he built one in
2011, and he gave me his parts list and I built exactly the same thing. I think we are on borrowed time, but so far so good. I did need to oil two Fans this week, that quieted them right down.Mikek
Didn't have a machine with SATA till 2010. I might assign blame to the IDE HDD trays that were used, but the trays were adopted after steady failures. Used to have to keep three drives on rotation for my main-use machine for back-up and recovery of OS. Never re-installed an OS, but many 'repair' instances.
I suppose an OS issue could be mistaken for a HDD failure.
I understood there was an error correction issue with parallel bus.
RL ?
I hear that cars made in 1950 were more reliable than cars made in 1910 too. (as in 2020 computers vs 1980 computers - 40 years of evolution)
Intelligent design? (ducking)
John ;-#)#
I'm not sure that is completely correct. How many cars in 1950 would crash without hitting something? They do now!!!
-- Rick C. -- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging -- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
Can't really say about hard drives, all my important systems have gone over to SSDs. But, if you stay away from the super high capacity bleeding-edge ones, then even the magnetic drives are pretty reliable, now.
As for CPU reliability, I have had a few failures, but my most important systems have all been Dell Optiplex (commercial vs. their home systems). I bought one used on eBay and ran it 24/7 for 12 years, then retired it to my mother in law, and it is STILL going!
I run all Linux systems, and have had several stay up over a year. My record was 460 days, then I had to shut it down to diagnose a dead page scanner. These are daily use web surfing, electronic design and accounting, use it for everything computers. My web/email/DNS/file server computer is directly on the net, and usually stays up for 6 months or more before there's a power failure or some other reason to shut it down, even though hackers are constantly trying to break in.
I'm astonished at the reliability of these systems!
Jon
John Robertson wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:
It was all those prohibition years... And then the great depression... that spurred design innovation too. ;-)
ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.