29 Jan
2014
29 Jan
'14
4:21 p.m.
On Jan 28, 2014, at 8:36 PM, Dan Gahlinger <dgahling at hotmail.com> wrote:
Ok that leads to a question.
how often (x times per y years) should old equipment be powered on to safegaurd them?
drives, systems, etc?
How about turning on a hard drive and doing a read of the whole disk just to revive the
magnetic flux?
That?s not how disks (or tapes) work. You may be thinking of the read/restore cycle in
core memory (or the shift register cycling of bubble memory). For disks and tapes and
floppies, read is passive; it should not affect the stored flux but it most definitely
does not ?revive? it.
Reading media to get all the data and write it to new media may be worth doing, to deal
with the possibility of the media going bad. I suspect that?s more of an issue for tape,
which can become sticky, than for disks.
boot your vax once every x years just to get it going
I?m not sure that powering up systems ?just in case? is actually productive. Power up is
a stress for electronics. Minicomputers and beyond probably don?t mind much, but some
older mainframes were known to want to be powered continuously because you?d end up
repairing bits every power cycle. (CDC 6000 series comes to mind; I?m told that Illiac IV
had the same issue.)
paul