On Friday 13 April 2007, Ryan Sims wrote: > On 4/13/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > hello, > > I heard of that using emerge --sync frequently may hert my > > hard-disk.
Uninformed idiots who tell you total garbage like that ought to be shot. No, they ought to be hung, drawn, quartered and their corpses hung out on a stick to be picked clean by crows. Seriously, I spend half my days on support debunking just this kind of twaddle. > This sounds like juju. Did your source provide numbers in support of > this conclusion, or is it just concern about hard drive thrashing? > > If there is a documented causal relationship between too-often syncs > and hard drive failure, I (and probably lots of other people) would > be interested to see it. Personally, I would be skeptical that even > daily syncs would do significant damage to a drive in good condition > (all other things being equal). Agreed. Here's what a hard disk does: The platters go round and round and round, then they go round some more. They have bearings, and as any engineering student will tell you, the thing that wears out a bearing is to change the speed is turns at or vary the load on it. With a disk drive, this only happens when it spins up or down. Otherwise, it will go round and round for something like 50,000 hours. While the platters are going round and round and round, the head is on the end of a disk actuator arm which goes in and out. This too will quite happily go in and out 1000s of times a day with no ill effects. And just to completely round everything off and put this whole topic into perspective: Your browser and mail client under normal use are using the disk many many times more intensively than a simple rsync to the portage tree ever could alan -- Optimists say the glass is half full, Pessimists say the glass is half empty, Developers say wtf is the glass twice as big as it needs to be? Alan McKinnon alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za +27 82, double three seven, one nine three five -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
