Patrick Grantham (at work) wrote:
> I self proclaimed "expert" tells that - no uncertain terms - that Unix (and
> Linux) trash hard drives after two-three years. What he says is that
> because of the heavy load that Unix puts on the heads and actuator, they
> wear sooner than they would on a M$ box. Could this have been true at one
> time? I've been in this game a while (albeit on the M$ side of the fence,
> but on the Linux side for about 3 years now. Sounds like bunk to me. Any
> thoughts?
>
Unless I am deliberately doing something on my Linux boxes, their hard
drives are not moving the heads. For a network server which is kept
under load by user demands, the drives will be in use, but that is true
of any OS. In fact, I would say that for any given hardware
configuration, for similar loads, the Linux machines will use the drives
less; because Linux uses less memory than Windows, we will swap to disk
less (or not at all) than a Windows machine under the same load, and we
will have more room in memory to cache user files!
Also, I suspect that our use of swap partitions, rather than swap files,
will result in less wear on the drive. The fact that Windows has to go
through the filesystem level to get to its swap space should incur a
performance/work/wear penalty (this is why Oracle uses a special
non-filesystem partition to stores its databases).
--ronan
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 19:19:14 EDT