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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Clarence Dodge who wrote (3765)	11/28/1998 7:15:00 PM
From: Spots	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

>>But why not give it (the fan) a rest every now and then? Wouldn't that prolong its life? Does a continuous use rating really mean a fan will last just as long whether or not it is used continuously or discontinuously? I think you're asking the wrong question. The fan is there to protect electronic components which, in general, will suffer more from shutdown/startup than from running continuously. You're not typing into your fan, are you? You're typing into your sophisticated finite state automaton which hangs on your every character as your faithful electronic servant, ready to post deathless SI messages, etc. <g> As to whether or not you're saving the fan a bit, maybe so, maybe not. Depends a lot on the fan (the cheaper the fan the more you can save it, probably, by not running it, and the less you will gain from that activity). So? Get a sensor to tell you when your fan fails, and protect the parts you really care about. Spots BTW, a high-quality fan will last 100,000 hours of continuous duty. Figure THAT out in years of continuous operation and decide if you'd rather have your fan last longer than that or your CPU last half that long <g>. [Edit] Disks are more important. They will probably live as long run continuously as they will shut down daily and restarted, or maybe longer. They maintain more nearly constant temperatures running constantly, so they do not suffer mechanical distortions that affect close tolerances. Or so I perceive. Maybe a disk engineer will pop up and tell me I'm wrong, but I've got some darned old disks running which haven't stopped for over a day in the last five years. Wish I could say that about all of my younger disks <g>, but those problems were design flaws, not wear, IMO. WDC dropped the ball.