Bad for hard drive?

[Joyn]

Have only got a Pentium III Processor 650 MHz and so it can take up to 30 hours to encode a film to SVCD. Is this bad for the hard drive?

[BJ_M]

shouldnt be -- keep it cool though if it seems hot ..

[Joyn]

Thank you.

[Dubber]

First, install as much RAM as you can afford/MB would accept.
If having two HDDs, move your swap file off of boot HDD to the other one.

It shouldn't take 30hrs... I got Celeron 600MHz with 256MB RAM and it'd take only up to 9hrs for a 2hr movie.

[kitty]

Hard drives are pretty tough so repeated use does not hurt for the most part. Keeping cool is a goos idea - the PC fan should allow air to circulate in the case.

Power spikes are more dangerous than hard drive use. I don't know how stable the power is in Scotland but it should not be too bad.

[ktnwin]

Actually, the HDD is spec'ed to work up to 55 degree C, there is no problem keeping the PC powered on ALL THE TIME (days after days, weeks after weeks). The only way to make the drive get really really hot is to run a diagnostic software to do full range random seeks to the drive for a long time. Touching the drive and you will pull back your hand right away, but the HDD can still sustain this kind of heat.
When you do video encoding, there are extremely minor disk activities, so the drive won;t got that hot anyway, why worry.

[solarfox]

I agree that 30 hours is wayyyyyyy too long an encode time... More memory would help (up to a point), as would a faster CPU.

However -- if you have two physically separate hard drives, capturing your video to one and then encoding to the other will boost your speed much more than moving the swapfile will. It drastically reduces the number of head seeks the drive has to do, since the heads won't constantly be shuffling back and forth as the encoder program reads a few blocks of captured AVI, then writes a block of MPEG, reads some more AVI, writes some more MPEG, ad infinitum.

(Me, I have my primary HD split into a 15Gb OS-and-applications C: partition and a 25Gb "Encoder Destinaiton" D: partition, while all of my raw captures go onto the secondary HD's E: partition. Speeds things up by quite a bit! This also speeds up DVD Workshop when it's getting ready to make a DVD-R image and burn the disc, since I set its working directory (where it builds temporary copies of the VOB/IFO files and VIDEO_TS directory prior to burning) to E: while all of the MPEG files come off of D:. )

As far as running the drives for such long periods of time goes, I don't think that it's actually "bad" for them, as such -- in other words, I don't think it'll directly damage them, barring some outside influence such as a strong power surge which damages the PC in general, or the entire PC being somehow knocked off the desk while it's running. However -- like anything else, hard drives do have their limits; they're full of very precisely-engineered moving parts, and they are typically engineered and rated to only work for a certain number of hours, on the average...

[BJ_M]

500,000 hours typically MTBF .. 50% duty cycle ..

HD's last longer keeping them powered up (less thermal and power cycles) and the lubrication is designed for use at operating temp .. doesnt lub as well cool ..

[Joyn]

Thanks to everyone for advice. It sounds as if, once more, I need a more powerful computer! What's new in that? Ever since my first Sinclair Speccy, beloved Amiga 1200 etc it has been necessary to move on - or has it? Until I started this DVD lark 2 weeks ago it was ok. Have made a few VCDs and SVCDs to satisfy my curiosity so maybe I could stop now - but is that likely or even possible? C'est La Vie!

[solarfox]

500,000 hours, my arse... I've never had a hard drive last fifty-seven years of continuous operation (for obvious reasons!), or anything even close to it. I'd love to know from what patch of thin air the HD manufacturers are pulling that bit of statistical fiction...

Based on actual experience, I'd say you're lucky to get more than 10,000 hours out of a drive these days, particularly if you don't leave your computer running 24/7... (Spin-up/spin-down cycling is certainly an issue, which is why you're actually better off disabling Windows' stupid power management on a desktop machine.)

[BJ_M]

Western Digital Enters Enterprise Storage Market with World's First 10,000 RPM Serial ATA Hard Drive

LAKE FOREST, Calif. - February 10, 2003 - Western Digital Corp. announced today that it is entering the enterprise hard drive market with an Enterprise Serial ATA (ESATA) product called WD Raptor.

The new hard drive offers systems builders and storage vendors enterprise-class specifications: 1.2 million hours MTBF, 10,000 RPM, 5.2 ms average seek time and a five-year warranty. With its WD Raptor, Western Digital applies its high-volume design and manufacturing principles and economies of scale from its ATA business to an enterprise-class platform. The result is an ESATA hard drive with a significant cost advantage over SCSI devices. In storage systems, hard drives typically represent the greatest cost. The WD Raptor hard drive enables storage vendors and systems builders, from large to small, to minimize their customers' storage hardware costs, while not sacrificing reliability, data integrity or performance.

Expected to be shipping later this month, the WD Raptor hard drive is expected to sell for approximately 30 percent less than competing SCSI hard drives. Initially, the hard drive will be available in a 36 GB capacity. In addition to its 5.2 ms average seek time, 10,000 RPM, 1.2 million hours MTBF and five-year warranty, data throughput is 150 MB/second from the SATA interface. The performance roadmap for SATA extends up to 600 MB/second, ensuring a reliable standard for storage providers and customers in the years ahead

http://www.westerndigital.com/company/releases/PressRelease.asp?release=%7BDB097012-16...573035C067C%7D

[solarfox]

BJ, I wasn't disputing that the hard drive manufacturers claim those kinds of lifespans... What I dispute is the means by which they arrive at those numbers.

1.2 million hours? That's 50,000 days, or just a shade under 137 years. Now obviously, they have not actually tested a batch of drives for 137 years to determine whether or not they really last that long, so how can they actually claim it? These MTBF numbers are statistical fictions; they arrive at them by extrapolating results from "accelerated aging" tests, conducted in a lab over a few weeks, which may or may not actually mimic how a drive really ages over the course of months or years in real-world operating conditions.

I stand by my statement, which is based upon actual experience with actual drives running in actual PC's in a real, live computer room. I have used Seagates, IBMs, Maxtors, Quantums, Western Digitals, and Samsungs, in a variety of sizes, models, and configurations, inside multiple different desktop, laptop, and embedded-control-system PC's... and in all cases, my experience has been that if you get three years out of a drive, you're doing well. (So keep those backups current!)