Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Leave on 24/7?

Spacedust said:
Mechanical drives will die in about 1,5-2 years if you won't spin the down.
Click to expand...

BS. we had a storage array at work that was powered up 24/7 that had only 2 drive failures (out of 24 drives) in 5+ years.

What killed it? AC Failure. The server room got up to 55 degrees celsius, and the following week one drive failed. Another one failed a few months later. Allegedly, the grease in the bearings gets too hot, then the bearings dry out. No idea if that is true, but I've definitely seen things (drives, CPUs, RAM) fail shortly after over temp.

I have other PC servers that have been powered up continuously, barring extended power outage for 7+ years.

Power surge from power on is what will kill things, along with excessive heat.
 
tony3d said:
Is it best to keep your computer running 24/7? A friend of mine at Fermi Labs swears by it. He clams server grade workstations are designed to run 24/7. He said he hasn't had any problem for 2.5 years. He claims the surge from flicking the power switch puts far more stress on componets, and hard drives, than just letting it run. He is an engineer in digital electronics at Fermi. What do you say?
Click to expand...

JMO: From a power consumption POV it's best to set your MP to auto sleep after a modest (~1 hour) delay.

There will be NO significant difference in HW reliability when using this sort of power management profile.

cheers
JohnG
 
Last edited:
The Mac Pro is designed to be able to run 24/7 and even at full CPU power 24/7, given the server grade nature of pretty much the whole machine.
 
Been running my iMac nearly continuous for four years, 24/7. Only down time being when thunderstorms were too close, or I moved my setup. I typically have business related tasks running all hours of the day, as well as distributed computing projects.

Suggest if you are going to run 24/7, to put some distributed computing projects running in the background. This way you can donate idle CPUs and GPUs time to some worthy project. You can find projects via BOINC or Wiki.
 
throAU said:
BS. we had a storage array at work that was powered up 24/7 that had only 2 drive failures (out of 24 drives) in 5+ years.

What killed it? AC Failure. The server room got up to 55 degrees celsius, and the following week one drive failed. Another one failed a few months later. Allegedly, the grease in the bearings gets too hot, then the bearings dry out. No idea if that is true, but I've definitely seen things (drives, CPUs, RAM) fail shortly after over temp.

I have other PC servers that have been powered up continuously, barring extended power outage for 7+ years.

Power surge from power on is what will kill things, along with excessive heat.
Click to expand...

Drives below 1 TB aren't failing very fast. Drives larger than 1 TB especially in RAID 5/6 can be killed in almost 2-3 months.
 
Spacedust said:
Drives below 1 TB aren't failing very fast. Drives larger than 1 TB especially in RAID 5/6 can be killed in almost 2-3 months.
Click to expand...
I'm glad my eight WD RE-4 2TB drives in RAID6 have the 5-year warranty. If it were true that putting enterprise drives into a parity RAID resulted in their demise every quarter, the disk manufacturers would be out of business by now.
 
Spacedust said:
Drives below 1 TB aren't failing very fast. Drives larger than 1 TB especially in RAID 5/6 can be killed in almost 2-3 months.
Click to expand...

Greetings traveler! I am saddened to hear about the short life expectancy and major design problems that mechanical HDDs experience on your planet. Here on Earth, things aren't so grim!

derbothaus said:
I think a little proof is needed on this one.
Click to expand...

Yeah, no kidding!

I'm wondering where all these "facts" regarding HDD life expectancy are coming from, because they bear absolutely no relation to any real-world experience I've ever had.

We have RAID 5/6's with mechanical 2-3TB HDDs in servers, which have been running for years. They don't sleep, they don't hibernate, they pretty much spin 24/7 perpetually. Yes occasionally a drive gets toasted, you pop it out, RMA it, pop in a new hot spare, the end. There isn't some magical drop-dead date.

If something dies in 2-3 months, there is a major problem somewhere and I have never seen this aside from one very isolated quarter in 2010 when Seagate released a boatload of defective drives.

A lot of these "facts" really have absolutely nothing to do with reality.

wonderspark said:
I'm glad my eight WD RE-4 2TB drives in RAID6 have the 5-year warranty. If it were true that putting enterprise drives into a parity RAID resulted in their demise every quarter, the disk manufacturers would be out of business by now.
Click to expand...

This.
 
Last edited:
Melbourne Park said:
There's the classic story, of the Mac Plus with an internal drive (no, not an SE20)
Click to expand...

Must've been an SE. The Mac Plus only had a 1.44MB disk drive, no expansion bay. And no internal cooling fan. If you wanted a hard drive, you had to hook up an external one via SCSI. (I know, I had one)

Spinning up the hard drive daily puts far more wear on it than just keeping it running at a constant RPM. Eventually it'll die either way, but you're better off running 24/7 despite the higher electricity costs.

Also, I've had trouble with Sleep on my Mac Pro (caused a disk error once, had to boot from recovery disk), so I advise against that.
 
Those of you with an SSD boot drive, do you ever sleep your system? I heard that SSD's don't respond well when put into sleep mode and it can cause them to brick up. So do you just shut your system down at night and when your away from your machine all day?
 
I know that the MacPro is capable of running 24/7 without any issues since we run all our mac pros in the office 24/7. But at home, I have to pay electricity, so I shut it down. :)
 
SteelBlueTJ said:
Those of you with an SSD boot drive, do you ever sleep your system? I heard that SSD's don't respond well when put into sleep mode and it can cause them to brick up. So do you just shut your system down at night and when your away from your machine all day?
Click to expand...
Correct... I don't sleep my machine ever. I'm almost always running a RAID tower, and I just generally don't see any reason to sleep it when I'm not using the RAID. It only takes a few seconds to boot up, so it's not like it's a big deal. In fact, it takes a lot longer to load up all the files from a feature film project in Premiere than it does to boot from a completely cold state.

When the day comes that I can't wait 20-30 seconds for my system to start up, it will be my indication that my life is too stressful.
 
petsounds said:
Spinning up the hard drive daily puts far more wear on it than just keeping it running at a constant RPM. Eventually it'll die either way, but you're better off running 24/7 despite the higher electricity costs.

Also, I've had trouble with Sleep on my Mac Pro (caused a disk error once, had to boot from recovery disk), so I advise against that.
Click to expand...

Most consumer grade HDDs aren't tested for 24/7 use. In terms of spinning up/spinning down, power management settings can spin these things down even when the computer is turned on.
 
[
[/COLOR]
SteelBlueTJ said:
Those of you with an SSD boot drive, do you ever sleep your system? I heard that SSD's don't respond well when put into sleep mode and it can cause them to brick up. So do you just shut your system down at night and when your away from your machine all day?
Click to expand...

Macbook Airs all have SSDs. So too the Macbook Pro Retinas. Many Macbook Pros were and are sold with SSDs instead of Winchester drives.

And they probably mostly utilise sleep - which extends their battery life - which is important in notebooks.

I'm curious about why a Mac Pro would not handle an SSD with the ease that a Mac notebook does.
 
Last edited:
thekev said:
Most consumer grade HDDs aren't tested for 24/7 use. In terms of spinning up/spinning down, power management settings can spin these things down even when the computer is turned on.
Click to expand...

I use server-grade HDDs in mine, and have my power management turned off (aside from the display). As we all move to SSDs, this will fortunately become a moot issue.
 
petsounds said:
I use server-grade HDDs in mine, and have my power management turned off (aside from the display). As we all move to SSDs, this will fortunately become a moot issue.
Click to expand...

That makes more sense. Those things are actually designed for such use.
 
I never turn mine off, except for when we leave home for a week or more and when it needs an update.
 
Spacedust said:
Drives below 1 TB aren't failing very fast. Drives larger than 1 TB especially in RAID 5/6 can be killed in almost 2-3 months.
Click to expand...

I have another 16 drive array with 1tb SATA drives in it (RAID50) that is 4 1/2 yrs old that has not had a single drive failure. And that has been averaging 900-1200 IOPs all day every day for the past year (read: it's getting hammered).


Conversely, my brand new 48 x 600 gb SAS array (RAID-DP) just had a drive failure within 2 weeks.


Does that mean to stay away from 600gb sas drives as they are failure prone? Of course not...


Power surges and excessive (beyond spec) heat kill drives. 24x7 operation does not.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back