Do you leave PC on 24-7?

[Lucas]

Same here. 24x7 operation.
However, you have to monitor temperatures for a few days to feel comfortable that during hot summer days they dont rise too much.
After the fans are set up appropriately, then you will be able to leave home without wondering what the temps will do to your system.

I am on vacation now and I know that my Sage system has been running continuously for the last 2 weeks without a glitch.

[hmca]

Mine has run 24/7 for 9 months with the occasional reboot as required for software installation. Most of the time she is in S3 Suspend, and only going to full power for record or play operations, then back to S3.

[Naylia]

S3 suspend mode for me. It works fabulous...depending on your precise hardware configuration.

[Mahoney]

I put mine in S3 standby (using the remote) whenever I'm not using it. SageTV wakes it up to do any recordings that are scheduled, and I have set it to wake up at 3:00 AM to download the EPG feed, do the EPG update and do any Windows updates necessary. It can wake from S3 using the remote, too. Works fine. I'm not too keen on using energy unnecessarily (however cheap), and while it's a quiet PC it's not so quiet you aren't aware of it in the living room; and it's quite hot enough in our flat already without the PC joining in the party!

[Mahoney]

Originally Posted by nielm

24/7: otherwise there would be no way to access the Sage webserver from outside of home! (not to mention various motherboards/graphics cards little 'ideosyncracies' with Suspend/Resume)

Can't you have some form of wake-on-lan for that? Not something I have any experience of, but I thought it existed.

[hmca]

Originally Posted by Naylia

S3 suspend mode for me. It works fabulous...depending on your precise hardware configuration.

Just how fast does your Sage Box come out of S3 to the Screen Saver. I have measured 30 seconds for mine. It used to be 2 minutes before I used Partition Manager to defrag the Boot Sector.

[sleonard]

Originally Posted by Mahoney

Can't you have some form of wake-on-lan for that? Not something I have any experience of, but I thought it existed.

Yes, that part of the sleep/wake power management actually worked very well for me. About half the time I would get a not found error in IE as it could take a min. or two to fully wake but I would just click the reload button and Voila!

Unfortunately, little else in the S3 suspend/wake cycle works reliably. I also Dirmon and SA on the system so I have had to put the whole S3 sleep thing on hold for now.

[DFA]

I use S3 and works perfectly for me along with Dirmon & SA. However, getting S3 to work correctly initially was a problem. Not an MS OS problem per se, although there are some MS reg mods for some USB things but primarily a problem with drivers that do not compy. XCard is one such driver that is problematic with S3.

DFA

[johnb41]

2 questions:

1) What is this "S3" thing everyone's talking about. Sage version 3? If so, is this a feature that allows Sage to wake up from a Standby to make a recording?

2) Most importantly, doesn't Standby stop the monitor and hard drive? If so, it would cool down. Then when it wakes up, it would warm up again. Rinse and repeat. Doesn't this defeat the purpose of us wanting to keep a PC running all the time; so it doesn't ever cool down and heat up continuously?

... hmm...it just occurred to me... in Standby, do the other PC components like motherboard, sound card, etc stay warm when in Standby? So then it would just be the hard drive that does the cool/hot cycle. Which may be a better alternative than letting the disc spin continuously for years straight. Am I right?

Thanks for your help and advice!

John

[silkshadow]

I use a combo of 24/7 (server), S3 (recording client) and hibernate (client) on my various HTPCs. On my server, besides forced reboots by MS updates and the like, I've had 100% uptime.

1) What is this "S3" thing everyone's talking about. Sage version 3? If so, is this a feature that allows Sage to wake up from a Standby to make a recording?

Its a setting in your bios under power management. S3 is really suspend to ram, as opposed to s1 *suspend) which is only a slightly lower power state than 'on'. Sage sets entries into the system timer so that it will wake for a recording. The problem is not getting the box to wake but getting it to go into and stay in S3 (if you use wifi its a pain in the butt in my experience).

2) Most importantly, doesn't Standby stop the monitor and hard drive? If so, it would cool down. Then when it wakes up, it would warm up again. Rinse and repeat. Doesn't this defeat the purpose of us wanting to keep a PC running all the time; so it doesn't ever cool down and heat up continuously?

Yup. But the real danger is the initial jolt of electricity on boot. With S3 you do avoid this, mostly.

[johnb41]

So if i want to reduce the strain of powering up and down (expanding and contracting of PC components), then I should keep it on 24/7 without putting it in Standby? This means that the hard drives are working 100% of the time. This is OK?

John

[johnb41]

Oh, one more thing...

If I set my PC to be S3 (in bios)... does this mean that when i go to StandBy, it goes to S3 suspend mode? If it's set to S1, then when i do StandBy it goes to S1 suspend mode? I'm just a little confused. I can't find anything in Windows that says "Suspend".

Thanks again!

John

[LowTech]

FWIW, my HTPC has been on 24/7 since May '04. Unless a good electrical storm pops up or I have to perform some sort of maintanance or upgrade it never gets shut down. I do not use S3 either.

I also have a 2 /12 year old HP office PC that also doesn't get shut down and have yet to witness any issues.

Now having said all of that it seems that I have more than likely violated one of the rules of Kharma and will no doubt face two computer crashes very shortly.

I need to find some wood to knock on.

Good luck on your project.

[sleonard]

Originally Posted by johnb41

So if i want to reduce the strain of powering up and down (expanding and contracting of PC components), then I should keep it on 24/7 without putting it in Standby? This means that the hard drives are working 100% of the time. This is OK?

In the power control panel you can tell Windows to shut down the monitor and the hard drives after x minutes and never to standby. This will turn off the signal to the display so that it can go into a low power state (if its a computer monitor that has PM, TV's must be manually turned off) and will also turn off the hard drives so that they are not constantly spinning. Setting Standby to never will keep the rest of the system in a full power state.

Originally Posted by johnb41

Oh, one more thing...

If I set my PC to be S3 (in bios)... does this mean that when i go to StandBy, it goes to S3 suspend mode? If it's set to S1, then when i do StandBy it goes to S1 suspend mode?

Correct.

Originally Posted by johnb41

I'm just a little confused. I can't find anything in Windows that says "Suspend".

Windows' Standby and the BIOS' Suspend are the same thing.

[sleonard]

I have a problem that I need help with. I'll post system specs when I get home if they are still needed.

My motherboard has 2 PATA 133 controllers, 2 SATA contollers in the chipset, and 2 more SATA/RAID controllers in a seperate chip.

I have a 20GB PATA drive for OS and Apps as master and a 320 GB PATA for recordings as slave on PATA 1.

On PATA 2 there is a CD/DVD drive as master.

Earlier this week I got my 2 500 GB SATA II drives from Dell and installed them on SATA 1 and SATA 2. I think those are both connected to the on-chip controllers.

SATA 3 and 4 are unconnected and disabled in BIOS.

First problem is that it appears that both SATA drives are in PIO mode not DMA. BIOS is set to auto detect and the only other option is to choose a PIO mode and disable DMA. Windows gives me no choice in the matter.

Second problem is a power management issue for this thread. I have told Windows to turn off the display after 3 minutes, the hard drives after 5 minutes and to Standby after 10 minutes.

Windows does turn of the video after 3 minutes but never turns off the hard drives nor goes into standby. If I manually put the system in Standby via a keyboard button, the computer wakes up after <5 seconds.

[johnb41]

I just read a great article on different sleep modes (S0 -S5): http://informationweek.com/story/IWK20020927S0028

Now I am wondering why so many people use S3! S1 seems to be better (in keeping PC on 24/7) S3, according to the article, shuts down just about everything except "just" enough to bring you back to Windows quickly when you boot up. So the entire computer cools down on S3 standby. Doing this repeatedly through the years will cause wear and tear from constant cooling and heating of the computer.

But S1 mode seems to be what I want. It ONLY shuts down the monitor and the hard drive(s). The article doesn't mention shutting down anything else. So i'm guessing all components other than the monitor and hard drive(s) will stay warm/hot when you go into StandBy (which is good, according to this thread). That seems like a nice alternative to keeping entire PC on at full power 24/7. The PCI boards stay warm, and never expand and shrink, and the hard drive(s) get less wear and tear from constantly spinning forever.

Am I correct in thinking S1 is better than S3 when leaving a computer on 24/7?

John

[flavius]

Does anybody know about a cheap and reliable device to actually measure the impact on the power bill?

[ke6guj]

way back in the day, 1980-85 or so, my dad borrowed a meter that you could plug in-line with something like the refrigerator and measure the usage. IIRC, he got it from the city(they generate and supply their own power for customers in the city).

I'd try calling your local power company and see if they can hook you up.

[greggerm]

Originally Posted by johnb41

Am I correct in thinking S1 is better than S3 when leaving a computer on 24/7?

I would say that is a matter of opinion. Most people using S3 to sleep their system are more worried about electric costs than wear-and-tear. You'd be dealing with two different mentalities.

S1 will give you minimal power savings because in essence, you are only spinning down the hard drives - your TV set is probably turned off anyway.

S3, as you mentioned, also powers down many of the components except those needed for a rapid recovery, saving much more power.

I think it's just a case of two different trains of thought - those who feel that immediate power savings is an important factor, and those who feel that the power cycling will lead to broken components, which in the long run are more expensive to replace than the electricity used to power them over the long haul.

Personally, I wouldn't use S1 - the benefits aren't there for me. I would probably just set Windows up to spin down the drives in the Power Management area after an hour or so of inactivity. At the moment, I don't use any power management, and I am going to compare my electric bill against the ones from the last months, where I had my PC fully shutting down every night at 12:30 AM. (with an auto-start set for 6:00am).

-Greg

[SprDtyF350]

I have 5 computers floating around here that run 24/7 for various reasons. Sage server, client, and just not ever turning the others off. Only problem I have ever seen is a couple of fans that died. Only power setting I use is what is in Windows power management. I kind of think the power cycle, my computer won't last forever thing is overblown. By the time you power cycle your system enough to break it you will be running a dinosaur that needs to be updated anyway.

Randy