Don Y wrote:
Depends on the
drive. I've had modern 80GB, and 160GB drives die on me
after only about a year of use (funny how they go just past the
warranty!). These were well taken care of drives. Meanwhile I have
several 5MB 5.25" full height Seagate drives for my Lisa that are nearly
25 years old - and they still work, though they sound like jet engines
when I turn them on.
But how many *hours* do they have on them?
One of them had quite a lot of hours. I
used it every day for at least
3-4 hours for about 2-3 years before upgrading from the Lisa running
MacWorks to a Hackintosh IIcx (that's a Mac IIcx motherboard, which I
hooked up inside a 286's hacked up case, with that 286's power supply &
third party memory, hard drive, floppy, etc.). :-) Of the two modern
drives, one of the 80GB drives was inside a machine that I rarely used -
maybe I powered it on every other weekend or so.
I prefer SPARC LX's... they draw maybe *40* watts?
(though I
don't move much network traffic through them so I can live with
their reduced bandwidth) Perhaps I'll replace the disk with
a solid state drive and cut that (and the noise) even more...
I'd rather go
with a Mac Mini - the original G4 one. Runs at 80Watts
and has a gig of RAM + 1.2GHz CPU. :-) more performance/watt there. I
do have a lovely sparcstation voyager which is similar to that LX, but
with only 32M of RAM, I had to use CF flash cards in a PCMCIA<->CF
cradle for swap. Runs Solaris 2.6 just fine.