Hi David,
A couple of years ago we had a lot of CMOS battery deaths on systems that
were about 3 years old (and virtually always powered on). These were
Intel consumer-grade motherboards.
In the past year, a large number of Supermicro Opteron motherboards had
their batteries dying within a few months of arrival. This was probably a
batch of bad batteries, or the batteries were overheated (cooked!) during
transport or storage of the motherboards.
The speed of chemical reactions is an exponential function of temperature.
So even a short period of overheating during transport or storage can
cause the chemical reactions within the battery to run rapidly towards
completion. At home, we keep our spare batteries in the refrigerator to
counter this.
At some point we simply did a wholesale replacement of the motherboard
batteries with fresh new ones.
The good news is that you can buy boxes of 100 name-brand CMOS batteries
at very low cost (less than $1 per battery). When you get a box, test one
battery by discharging it across a resistor over a period of a week and
measuring the number of milliamp-hours that it delivers. If not within
specs, return the batteries to the vendor saying that they are substandard
and probably have not been properly stored.
Cheers,
Bruce
On Fri, 27 Jul 2007, David Mathog wrote:
The question: what is the expected motherboard battery lifetime in
systems that are continuously on?
Background:
The question arises because it was necesary to cycle the power today
on a couple of nodes by unplugging them and then plugging them
back in again. When one came back up the BIOS settings were gone.
That wasn't evident until a keyboard and monitor were plugged in.
Losing BIOS settings when power is removed is pretty much the
classic symptom of a dead motherboard battery.
These nodes are now about 5 years old, and that is about the average
battery lifetime in PCs that are turned off every night. However these
nodes have been on 99.99% of that time, so presumably the drain on the
battery should have been nil. Shelf life for motherboard batteries is
typically about 10 years. There is no info on how old the batteries were
that went into these systems, but presumably Tyan goes through a lot of
batteries and these were probably fresh when installed.
So bottom line, is this just a freak event or would you expect the
other motherboard batteries to also die soon?
Thanks,
David Mathog
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
