Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners power-up...or not

Is there any harm to leaving a system (amp,pre,cd) powered up at all times, other than the electrical cost?

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Is there any harm to leaving a system (amp,pre,cd) powered up at all times, other than the electrical cost?

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Absolutely!
The harm created by electrical generating stations floods upland areas increasing methyl mercury levels in fish and inevitably in human consumers.
An increase in electrical usage requires more load on coal and oil burning plants adding tons of carcingoenic PAHs into the atmosphere along with NOx and H2S which forms the lovely smog and acid rain that falls in our fair countries.
More electrical usage means more nuclear plants and an increased production of spent, yet highly radioactive uranium (or plutonium) rods.

Do the earth a favour and shut off the electronics. Don't listen to the fear mongers about home electronics 'life span'. It is bunk.
Ask anyone who has owned x unit since 1970/ 1982/ 198....and still uses it.

I'd balance what Chess said with several points:

(1) The actual total power consumption of the stated components in the conditions under discussion is likely under five watts. It's unlikely you'd leave the volume cranked to max and leave the room for hours.

(2) Repeatedly power cycling electronic components likely decreases their life span, at least to some degree. There's likely wide variation depending on age, type, ambient conditions, etc. Whether this is significant for an individual case is virtually impossible to predict. However if a controlled test and statistical examination of thousands of units were done, IMO there would be a lifespan difference, at least under some test parameters.

(3) If the statistical lifespan is decreased even slightly, that increases the environmental burden of disposing of the failed equipment, some of which contains toxic materials. You'd have to balance this cost against the alternative of leaving the equipment on.

(4) If you want to make a meaningful improvement in energy consumption, other very effective possibilities exist. Proper home weatherstripping and insulation, or just ensuring proper vehicle tire pressure can save significant energy and associated environmental costs. E.g, if most vehicle owners simply used the proper tire pressure, this would save 1.24 billion gallons of gasoline per year, just in the U.S.

Personally I don't leave equipment powered up all the time. If I'm away for a few minutes and may return, I leave it on. If I know I'll be away for an hour, I turn it off.

Hi mace,

I believe that long-term deterioration due to heat build-up when you leave equipment powered on outweighs any effects caused by the on/off power surge when you turn equipment on or off. For the casual use most consumers make of A/V gear, I believe turning it off extends service life.

I can speak with some authority here: I'm old! And I have some solid-state gear that dates back 25 years that still works perfectly. In an age of diminishing fossil fuel supplies, it also strikes me as egregiously wasteful to leave equipment powered on.

Historically, this trend migrated from professional recording studio and broadcast practices, where equipment used to be left on because it was in more or less constant use. And in the vacuum-tube era, leaving equipment on usually meant more consistent performance because tube performance drifts and takes a while to settle down when they are fired up from a cold state.

And what is it these days with outboard hard drives that have no on/off switches? I thought I'd lose data if I unplugged my Maxtor, but it's fine. It drove me crazy when I'd walk by the thing and hear it whirring away at night in my home office. So I unplug it when I'm not in my office.

Regards,

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And what is it these days with outboard hard drives that have no on/off switches?

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Adding a switch into the AC line adds unnecessary pseudo-metallic interference and may degrade the signal quality provided by the drive. Maybe look at upgrading your AC cord to a hospital-grade one?

(tongue planted FIRMLY in cheek)

Bren R.

So, even if the machine is off it doesn't spin down the drive? I've never used external drives because I don't particularly need them but that seems odd, although there's certainly no need to worry about losing the data if you unplug it (provided the machine is off that is.) A hard drive has the same "permanency" properties as a cassette or any other similar magnetic storage media. As long as the drive isn't in the middle of writing something when you unplug it you don't risk losing the data in any way (which it certainly shouldn't be if it's off).

Do you know if you can set up a power saving scheme in windows that can get it to spin down external drives? It's easy enough and I know it works with internal drives. Might be worth setting something up quickly to see if it is smart enough...

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Do you know if you can set up a power saving scheme in windows that can get it to spin down external drives? It's easy enough and I know it works with internal drives.

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It's called "parking" the drive head, when the platters slow, the small cushion of air that keeps the heads off them disappears and the heads are allowed to rest directly on the platter (in the LZone - Landing Zone, for those old enough to remember having to hand enter drive information, ah yes, Heads, Cylinders, Sectors, Write Precomp, LZone... but I digress). All IDE drives (well, I haven't taken a poll, but...) auto park the heads when the drive spins down... imagine it as being taking the stylus away from the record to keep a jolt from slamming it into the vinyl surface.

Not sure, but I THINK Gibson Research made the first manual head park application before they...

... wow, I started trailing off there.

Bren R.

I understand how the hardware works, I'm talking about software here. I've just never dug into external HD drivers so I don't know if you can get windows to convince them to spin down or not. It ought to be possible since an external drive is just an internal drive with some additional interface circuitry and a case. It would take about 30 seconds to test if you popped open the Power Options Property window. Alan had said his external drive would just keep spinning thus my question. Basically what I was driving towards is that if the drive spins constantly while plugged in, even if the machine is off, then what he could do is leave the machine on but in a mostly powered down standby mode and thus get the drive to spin down.

BrenR and Ringmir,

Thanks for the technical update on hard drives. I'd heard before that the drive head doesn't actually touch the platter. Very interesting, and, like you, I'd wondered if there isn't a means within Windows to command it to power down the spinning platter, because when I put my laptop into Hibernate, its hard drive doesn't keep spinning.

I'm somewhat techno-phobic with computers; when it's working fine, I don't like changing anything for fear of screwing something up.

Of course, BrenR, your analogy to the stylus and record was perfectly understandable (ha, ha), which reminds me of the JVC capacitive-head videodisc system, guided by a stylus, but I digress. . .

Regards,

"Hibernate" and "standby" are different beasts. "Hibernate" essentially shuts down the computer but stores everything from ram to disk to allow you to restore your working state. "Standby" powers down most drives and the monitor but the machine stays on, so you get a much faster wake time. Standby might still be noisier than you'd like if your pc fans are noisy though.

Normally (in a desktop) the HD is powered from the main power supply, so shutting the system down will shut it down as well. With an external HD you get an external power adapter, so the situation is not quite the same. I will try to experiment with an external drive at work and let you know what I find. Since the drive itself is the same I would imagine you can still somehow signal it to spin down.