I’m contemplating purchasing a new computer as the one I’m on seems to have had nothing but issues since the day I bought it. I’ve now read a few extensive reviews on the AMD Phenom processors and it seems that the general consensus is that they’re not as good as they could be but cheaper than their Intel counterparts.
I’m seeking the opinions of others on performance and features vs value for the two brands and openSUSE compatibility. Is there anything I should be aware of before making a decision. For example, am I likely to need the DDR3 support Intel has that AMD doesn’t? Will the neat power saving features of the AMD work with linux?
On a side note, what are some of the main contributors to HDD failure? My computer seems to have gone through an abnormally high number of HDDs and I’m wondering if it heat related or if my mother board is killing them.
Yeah make sure you have enough airflow around the disk. And of course lots of disk I/O doesn’t help so do have enough RAM to avoid swap most of the time.
the biggest single cause of premature hard drive failure is vibration. If your computer is on a desk and is running, then every time you nudge your desk the vibration will make the read/write head on the hard drive jump and skip on the surface of the drive platter. This read/write head floats about one hair widths above the platter, so you can see that you really so not require much of a bump to do damage. This leads to bad blocks and ultimate failure.
My computer is mounted on the wall and is not subject to any knocks or vibrations. I have been running computers for twenty odd years and have NEVER had a hard drive fail. This could of course be down to luck.
I’ve never put much into the whole intel/amd debate. Not being a computer person, to me they all just seem the same.
My last computer had AMD in it, and it wa fine. This computer is Intel, and it was when I got this computer I realised there was a difference. It just seems faster, so now, I love intel. Oh, and even better, none of the nvidia problems people are having, LOL.
> My last computer had AMD in it, and it wa fine. This computer is
> Intel, and it was when I got this computer I realised there was a
> difference. It just seems faster, so now, I love intel. Oh, and even
> better, none of the nvidia problems people are having, LOL.
Well there are any number of reasons why it might ‘feel’ faster and
none of them would matter if you had AMD or Intel. As far as nVidia goes,
I’ll take nVidia over any other chipset any day of the week.
Interesting. Do you know any other sources that state the same? Is there a type of vibration, when, being below a threshold, does not damage the hard drive at all?
What dou you think, shall the hard drives be fastened with screws to the holding wall strongly, or shall they be fastened via soft rubber fixtures?
I have no idea where the information came from as it was some twenty years ago, but I was told that a hard drive is a platter that revolves at 7200 rpm and the read/write head was shaped like a sycamore seed and floated on a layer of air which was something like the thickness of a hair above the fast spinning platter. If you bumped the computer case then this would shake the hard drive and make the floating read/write head skid on the revolving platter, and this would cause damaged blocks. I do not think that it is about a certain frequency of vibrations, but more about the jolt to the computer.
This all sounded very sensible and from that day until now I have always mounted my computer onto wall brackets. The current ones are made to support microwave ovens, with the extendable portions on the bottom removed, as they made the bottom too long. They are a simple L shape with the long length bolted to the wall and the computer sitting on the bottom of the L.
I think that it well worth doing as my hard drive failiure rate is zero compared to some of my friends who go through disks at a great rate.
> What’s wrong with ATi? I had an ATi Radeon9800XT back in 2004 and I
> loved it!
>
> I guess the Catalyst isn’t as stable as the drivers from nVidia, is
> that the cause of your opinion?
No, probably the fact that I lost 2 CRT monitors back in the day running
ATI cards with drivers that were pure $#@%% that eventually burned the
components out. And that was running Windows. I mean everyone has their
own lifes experience that they draw on so I’m quite certain someone out
there will have an nVidia horror story. I have owned many ATI cards over
the years, and I keep giving them a try but I’ve been universally
disappointed with each purchase.
To the best of my knowledge the platter armature is incapable of moving up or down, only sideways. It is therefore impossible for the arm to hit the platters and damage them. Whilst your explanation seems to make sense superficially, it doesn’t take into account that most HDDs are rated for impacts up to 8Gs and that standard HDDs are mounted in cars and laptops without problem where these ‘bumps’ are unavoidable.
you are correct when you say that laptops and in car players have hard drives, but I think that they have special and additional damping that a normal internal computer hard drive does not have.
I have trawled the net and you can find lots of references concerning bumps to computer cases and failing hard drives.
Me, I err on the side of safety and fit all of my computers to the wall rather than having them on a desk that would get knocked every time I sat at it, or even have it placed on the floor where it is just as susceptible to the occasional bump with a foot.
It is such a cheap an easy thing to do mounting them on microwave supports that for me it is a no brainer. But like all things it is just a matter of choice.