On Tue Mar08'22 04:20:48PM, Barry Scott wrote:From: Barry Scott <barry@barrys-emacs.org>
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2022 16:20:48 +0000
To: Community support for Fedora users <users@lists.fedoraproject.org>
Reply-To: Community support for Fedora users <users@lists.fedoraproject.org>
Subject: Re: Time to update the hardware?
On 7 Mar 2022, at 06:47, Javier Perez <pepebuho@gmail.com> 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