Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[dr_spork]

So I'm pretty new to linux and love puppy on my little old laptop. I especially love the standby time, because I often put it on standby and under ubuntu or Win2k it sometimes took a good 30 seconds to fall asleep and another 20 or so to wake up. Under puppy it goes to sleep instantaneously, and wakes up just as quickly. I gotta say, that's just great. I'm wondering, though, is this too good to be true? I once noticed on Ubuntu how most of the standby time is due to properly unmounting all the various partitions. If Puppy isn't properly unmounting drives when it goes into standby mode, is that dangerous for my HD over the longrun? Should I manually unmount my home partition before standing by, just to be safe?

BTW this is Puppy 2.15CE w/Fluxbox on a Fujitsu Lifebook FMV-650.

[Bruce B]

My theory is that heat more than any other factor will shorten the life of computer components, including hard drives.

Years ago I had the oportunity to oversee computers of which there were at least 200 hard drives.

The hard drives in mention were Western Digital 850 MB IDE and SeaGate 1GB SCSI drives.

They operated 24/7 and were constantly undergoing serious reads, writes and deletions. I expected to see failures before the MTBF (medium time between failures), but in reality, overall they grossly exceeded the MTBF.

The disk activity was really extreme compared to anything we would be doing with our personal computers.

The computers were located in remote locations and subject to horrible power fluctions and failures. They were running on UPS' but the UPS' were dead for the most part.

The only thing I can think that caused these drives to last so long is they were almost without exception running in cool or air-conditioned environments.

The drives that did fail, failed due to a variety of factors.

* Interface not being recognized by motherboard

* Rarely, broken read / write arms

* Bad sectors

* Failure to spin (rare)