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Study Finds That Humidity Has More Effect On Drive Failures Than Temperature (rackcdn.com)
AmiMoJo writes: A study by Rutgers University and Microsoft has found that hard drives are more prone to failure due to high levels of humidity [PDF] than high temperature. With a view to 'free cooling' data centres (using low external air temperature for cooling to save power), the paper notes that humidity related malfunctions of the driver controller / adapter are the dominant cause of drive failure. The good news is that while the researchers found that high relative humidity was a significant factor in drive failures, "[S]oftware
availability techniques can mask them and enable freecooled operation, resulting in significantly lower infrastructure and energy costs that far outweigh the cost of the extra component failures."
I don't believe the average person does that, so I doubt it's the common thing to do. I don't know anyone that leaves their computer on 24/7
and their drives would benefit more from just turning the computer off at night or when they leave home, instead of letting it run 24/7 which is the common thing to do.
The average person and their drives would benefit more from just letting their computer run 24/7, instead of turning it off at night or when they leave home which is the common thing to do. Disk defragmenting, software updates, and the like are nice to do when the computer has idle time. And drives spin down when not in use anyway. The constant warmer temperature reduces heating/cooling stresses and prevents condensation.
You're screwed, either way.
I do both. On even days, I leave it running 24/7. On odd days, I shut it off when not using it. Best of both worlds.
Yeah, and that has a huge effect on the hard drives in those smartphones ... oh, wait.
Oh no... it's the future.
So, what they are saying is, its not so much the heat..........
At least you're marginally more relevant talking about servers than you were with you smartphones comment. However the OP said "The average person and their drives would benefit more from just turning the computer off at night or when they leave home". I've highlighted the words that should give you a little clue that we're not talking about servers here.
Oh no... it's the future.
With power suspend technology, SSDs, CPU cores shutting parts off when not in use, and other power management abilities, it really doesn't make that big a difference. For example, Macs and most laptops will suspend after a period of time idle by default. Even on, a machine doesn't take much power, especially with modern SSDs where it has no moving parts that need to be powered other than a fan or two.
In the past, with CRT monitors and 5.25" HDDs that sucked up a large amount of power spinning the disks, it was a different story, but these days, there is a diminishing returns between powering everything off versus just letting the box suspend/idle.
Based on the recent finding, the IEEE has issued new guidelines to augment its previous best practices on disks...some of these are to be expected:
1. the classic practice of gently simmering disks in a succulent gravy is being phased out. gravy increases humidity, and its widely expected a dry rub will not only replace this practice in the future but help flavourful juices reach the surface of the drive
2. RAID arrays should be basted no more than every 25 minutes now, up from 5 minutes. This is partly due to the fact that RAID arrays come infused with a 15% solution of brine. ZFS arrays, as per normal, can be allowed to reduce in their own pools.
3. caching SSD's are unaffected by this finding. A light egg wash or light coat of melted butter toward the end of the partitions is still advised for best performance.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I mean Florida is pretty humid, right?
Yes, I only read the subject, why?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
On the other hard, on the Gobi Desert you get the best of both worlds (as long you don't want to live there). It's a cold desert, so you get low temperatures and low humidity.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
Would you like a shovel, so you can keep digging? Nobody is saying that there aren't plenty of computers that are on 24/7. The point that the OP made, which you seem determined to miss, was that those machines that are not on 24/7, would benefit from being so. It's a really simple point, and I can't really restate it using smaller words than that. We're all aware of the existence of smartphones, and servers; they just aren't relevant to the thread.
Oh no... it's the future.
I run a server in my basement and have more trouble with its drives then any other computer I have ever owned. I have left notebooks in hot cars, outside in the sun, exposed them to extreme cold too. But my basement always maintains at least a 50% humidity level even with dehumidifier. Its temp remains between 60F in Winter and 70F in Summer. I noticed one day my router was failing and decided to tear in down, and also realized its soldered board was oxidizing badly which most likely caused the failure. I then wondered if that was the same issues with my server? I do think too little humidity can also cause spurious static charges too so you don't want to not have some. maybe its time to rethink what acceptable is in humidity? I always thought below 50% was OK? But maybe below 40% is the sweet spot?
What I find rather unexpected about this paper's findings is that higher humidity caused more controller failure, rather than causing more mechanical issues. Yes, the mechanical bits are inside the enclosure with a filter to keep out dust; but they aren't fully sealed(unless new enough to be the helium filled ones) and water vapor will go right through a dust filter. The driver board is outside; but a bunch of solid-state components on a circuit board usually behave pretty well unless they are literally dripping or showing signs of corrosion. Am I just overestimating the reliability of PCBs?
They do not get along. Corrosion in such a high silver material is easy to accomplish, especially in the presence of a high concentration of water vapor. Fine pitch BGAs are already a fucking nightmare of solderability. Add humidity and the resultant corrosion and you're begging for failures.
I didn't even need a university study to know that. It has been known in manufacturing for years.
That would ruin my uptime statistics.
Have gnu, will travel.
On even days, I leave it running 24/7.
Er... surely just 24? If it's shut down on odd days then that's not even 24/2.
So should I take those silica gel sachets that come with everything, dry them in the oven and put them in my external HDD cases?
I think this is very common. I have my music library (Sonos) and network drives running all the time.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
Yeah, brought to you by the company that has to replace those drives under warranty...sure...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Conductive atmospheric material is bad for electronics.
Welcome to the EARLY 1990s, where we had already determined this before. Humidity kills most EVERYTHING.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The controllers are typically not sealed, which means that inherent atmospheric moisture, which would include corrosive stuff like sweat from humans that has evaporated into the atmosphere, etc., would kill those.
I suspect (without RTFA) that the platters are fine, it's the controller boards, or rather, the solder joints/traces, or poorly-sealed IC packaging, that died over time due to corrosion.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
This is very well known in military circles. They should conformally coat the drive controllers to protect them against moisture.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
That's odd. I don't know anyone who doesn't leave their devices on 24x7.
System defaults for power save settings make it a very, very minor thing in the overall household/business power bill.
For a business, compare the man-hours cost of waiting for computers vs the electrical costs of a low-power mode computer.
As for life-span, that debate has been going on for longer than the +25 years I've been in the industry. It's so close between the two that other factors take priority.
My wife gets pissed off if she has to reload Chrome. Screw OS up-time, she bases her system stability in Chrome up-time. She'll wait until Chrome's update icon color is red for a week before relaunching it. She used to go 2-3 months between rebooting her computer. Window's updates got mighty angry. Now Win10 reboots itselt at night, and I hear about it every time. "omg, my computer restarted! Now I gotta wait 15 seconds for Chrome to load my 50 tabs!". And I'm glad I have a low latency dedicated fiber connection with Level 3 as upstream. Opening Chrome pegs the connection for quite a bit with 50+ tabs. At least I got her a Samsung Pro M2. Freaking 2.5GiB/s and 300k IO/s, and still not fast enough.
I've spoiled her with good computers over the years. She has come to expect the computer to be instantly ready 24/7. I've been custom building computers since a wee lad.
What were we talking about again? Ohh yeah. I don't know anyone who doesn't leave their computer on 24/7, even my mom. Computers are appliances and need to be ready at a moment's notice.
This also depends on what type of heating you have.
I have electrical resistance heating. So leaving lights on, fan on, TV on, computer on doesn't make any difference in my bill at all. The heat generated by those items gets spread around anyway, and makes my resistance heater run a little less.
During heating season, a complete wash.
Summer on the other hand, I do turn stuff off more religiously.
I am using up the MTBF on the items I run though.
I have 3 desktop computers running 24/7, and even when I turned them off at night, my $50 electric bill did not change by a statistically significant amount. My electric bill is more affected by the weather or my wife's cooking habits. All of my lights are 10watt LEDs or 12.5watt CFLs, and the 2-3 lights that we run over 80% of the time are the LEDs in our living room with the computers. 80% of my electric bill comes from the stove, clothes drier, and fridge.
What were we talking about again? Ohh yeah. I don't know anyone who doesn't leave their computer on 24/7, even my mom. Computers are appliances and need to be ready at a moment's notice.
Standby mode achieves that, you don't need to actually leave the thing on burning tens of watts. With an SSD you don't even need to wait for the drive to spin up.
suck my pines 256 colors whore
"Well if it isn't Mr. Look-at-me-I'm-in-VGA! What'sdis? 256 colors for a little bitmapped wimp? Whatta waste of VGA, har har har!"
Heh. Nerd elitism is a funny thing.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
my laptop uses 36 Watts at full tilt, 17 at idle. And that's with an external hard drive plugged in.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
How many modern OSes actually let the drive spin down? It seems there's always a constant level of some activity going to the drive which keeps the drive always spun up. I suppose in Linux you might be able to put a stop to it with some effort, but in Windows you have no hope. Yes, I know the setting is still there, but I haven't seen it be useful since Windows 3.1.