Extending the life of your current machines...

[MysteriouX]

Here's an article from POPSci that states it isnt all about which Intel processor you have, its also about the graphics card that boosts your performance (talking about computer performance, for other stuff go somewhere else).

http://www.popsci.com/gear-gadgets/a...-graphics-card

[atlantean0208]

There is no problem with not shutting down your pc regularly. As I said in another thread, my PC is AMD Athlon bought in 2001 (so yes the processor sucks), still working as of now. The machine never stop working except when relocating or blackout.

I use the PC mainly for leeching activity. The only problem with this kind of operation is fragmentation of HD and wear/tear. You always doing deletion from the PC (after DVD-R burning) and adding stuff to the PC from downloading. So to prevent the "natural disaster", what I do is to create smaller partition like 5GB for torrent downloading, 1GB for usenet downloading and 1GB for direct-download (IDM, getright etc.).

With this technique my main drive (C drive) safe from excessive fragmentation and wear/tear because of the adding/deleting operation. It is also very easy to defrag the other partition because of the smaller size.

To make it more safe for your HD and your machine, I suggest you put everything you DL on another HD. This is what I plan to do this year. There will be virtually no DVD burning. What you do is to buy at least two 500GB HD (cost about 80-100 dollar per HD). Then just save everything in the HD. This is for people who're leecher-crazy who just download "anything under the sun" .

Let we do the math:

For a complete year season of anime (52 eps and using .avi) it will use about 9GB of the HD space. You can have at least about 50 new anime series stored safely in the HD. Most anime only 13 eps or 26 eps. So 500GB can be used for between 2.5 to 3 years of anime season.

For tv season (US), 1 season usually 22-24 episodes and also using 9GB, so similar with anime you also can have at least 50 full series. For movies downloading which is not alway regular that a good movie out (I usually download the one in the top ten only), you can burn movies to a DVD-R.

So for 1TB (160-200 USD) you can use it to store 50 series of tv & anime for 3 years of new season. It will save your time with burning DVDs, prolong your DVD writer life and you can do more things instead of waiting for the burning to finish, and then do labelling and putting them in the DVD album. I'm sure if you count the price of your blank DVD-R it will be more or less the same for 3 years use.

Not only that, you also can save your PC from early death/retirement. Once the HD is full, take it out and put them in a USB 2.0 HD enclosure which is also cheap. Or better, use an HD enclosure which can play media and have a tv out... voila!.

[MysteriouX]

Well technically loading files onto your hdd and deleting them often doesnt really cause wear and tear because as long as a computer is turned on the hdd will be spinning all the time, unless you use a powersave feature.

HDDs have what they call a MTBF (mean time between failure) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_time_between_failures

and normally thats at least 200,000 hours of usage at the lowend to over 500,000 hours of usage for the highend drives.

And writing and deleting files on a HDD doesn't cause wear because the read/write head never touches the surface of the memory platter. The read/write head is aerodynamically designed so that the fast speed of the platters' rotation causes the head to keep it floating above it without touching the surface. Of course the head and the platter may touch if it suffers from intense vibrations and such, but normally minor vibrations and shock doesn't cause them to touch due to the centrifugal forceof the spinning platters.

I'm not sure if they do this in your highschool physics class, but in mine when we studied centrifugal forces, we did an experiment where we sat on a rotatable stool with our feet not touching the floor and in our hands we had a modified bicycle wheel attached to a handle so that could freely turn. Then our teacher would spin the wheel as hard as he can and we try to twist the wheel without having ourselves rotate in our seats. VERY HARD NOT TO ROTATE sitting on that stool.

Harddrives utilize that concept to prevent the read/write head and the platters from touching even when we lift the powered on hdd and turn it sideways.

Also harddisk platters actually have a quite a few spare sectors which aren't used initially but as other sectors become bad the disk is remapped to the new sectors.

Only thing that can wear down is the motors. And of course there is the HEAT.

[atlantean0208]

Trust me, since I bought my PC in 2001, I already replaced a number of HDs, they just getting slow overtime even after formatting/defragmenting. While in the UK, at that time my broadband speed (telewest) is about 4MB (now I hear its 16MB) and I can get a max of ~ 500Kbs from usenet, so for 24 hours downloading, I can get easily more than 20GB perday, for a month about ~400GB, a year then you just do the math. I do this non-stop since then until now.

Right now after relocation to another country, my speed max about 1000KB, so more crazier operation. So the need for constant deleting/burning need to stop and with the HD nowadays dirt cheap.

So as I said, take care of your C drive, and do all those intensive disk writing/reading on another partition, this is from someone who has terrabytes of data or maybe pentabyte, I just lost the count . Since 2001 I got everything that is out from japan/us tv .

[MysteriouX]

what brand of HDDs do you normally buy? the cheap Maxtors?