Re: Time to update the hardware?

[Barry Scott]

>  On 8 Mar 2022, at 16:35, Ranjan Maitra <mlmaitra(a)gmx.com&gt;
> wrote:
>  
>  On Tue Mar08'22 04:20:48PM, Barry Scott wrote:
> > From: Barry Scott <barry(a)barrys-emacs.org&gt;
> > Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2022 16:20:48 +0000
> > To: Community support for Fedora users <users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org&gt;
> > Reply-To: Community support for Fedora users <users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org&gt;
> > Subject: Re: Time to update the hardware?
> > 
> > 
> > 
> >> On 7 Mar 2022, at 06:47, Javier Perez <pepebuho(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
> >> 
> >> Hi.
> >> I am using Fedora 35 and everything  is working fine in general.
> >> 
> >> But I was checking out my hardware and I realized that It is from 2013. My CPU is
> 4th generation intel and I am using the nvidia-470 drivers for my video card. Motherboard
> uses the H87 chipset.
> >> 
> >> System is being used for regular home use, no extreme gaming or anything that
> really stress it out. Occasional ffmpeg usage.
> >> 
> >> I just wonder if this combination will become obsolete anytime soon and should I
> worry about it...
> >> 
> >> Appreciate your thoughts on the matter.
> > 
> > I use a rule-of-thumb that hardware over 5 years old is likely to fail under me.
>  
>  Mine is that anything is going to fail under anybody at anytime. The warranty does not
> recover the actual drive so I keep several copies using rsync. (This helped me once, when
> my desktop HDD suddenly failed with a deadline in less than two hours). I rather tensely
> booted into one of my spare laptops and was able to continue (luckily I had rsynced a
> short while before and it was fairly current) and submit on time. The desktop had a spare
> drive (which was copied every hour) but I figured it would take more time to figure that
> out. 
Oh yes hardware can fail at any time. Indeed I had an in warranty drive fail after 9
months.
And a power supply fail after 13 months

My rule of thumb is really based on by experience that after 5 years the probability of a
failure rises
and I update kit to reset the risks.

Between RAID and regular off-site backups I hope to survive the worst events.


>  
> > 
> > For my file-server/email-server I use RAID enterprise disks with 5
> > year warranty.
> > When I'm at the end of the 5 years I replace the server completely.
> > 
> > My main desktop machine is getting old, coming up in 7 years, and parts
> > keep failing.
> > 
> > The motherboard ethernet died a little while ago and I added a ethernet
> > card. CPU fan sometime is noisy.
> > 
> > Now when booted into Windows 1 core is 90% busy all the time in
> > "System Interrupt" process. Fedora thinks the hardware is fine.
>  
>  Right, Fedora is able to handle things better, IMO. I also use openbox and no DE so I
> feel a bit more confident, perhaps without reason, that I am subjecting my machine(s)
> (even the ones with high resources) to (infinitesimally) less stress. After poking fun of
> my "Shunya (zero) distribution" as I call my personal "Fedora
> remix/spin" my wife prefers it too because she agrees it is snappier. 
Provided your hardware has good thermal design then that variation in load will not
matter.
Run at 90% CPU 24x7 works for years (without reboot with some users).

I have worked on hardware/software appliances where we learned the hard way that the
thermal design is critical to getting a very low RMA rate. We had the software monitor
the
temperature within the product and shut it down when it was in danger of going out of
spec.
This was a while ago and it was the HDD's that failed first. Once you get to the
rated
temperature max for a HDD its life can be measured in days.

Also I note is that we found that early hardware failures could be weeded out by using a
24 hour burn in period.

Barry


>  
>  Ranjan
>  _______________________________________________
>  users mailing list -- users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
>  List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
>  List Archives:
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail]
>  Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure