[QUOTE=LaurV;407807]The life time of (almost) any electronic device (from light bulbs to including your HDD) is longer if it runs continuously than if you repeatedly turn them on/off. The most of the devices that get damaged ("the most" like in 99%, but take this with a grain of salt, I have no data to back this up, it is just a "feeling"), they get damaged when you turn them on or off. How many of you have seen a light bulb booming during it was lighting, and how many of you happened to turn a light bulb on just to see/hear it booming. The HDD is just the same: spinning it up repeatedly means that the head has to be parked, then it has to be brought to floating position again (there are no "springs" to keep the head out of the disks' surface, this is done by "ground effect", during the disk spins, some air goes between the head and the plate, due to the aerodynamical form of the head, lifting the head up), and during this process there are more chances that the plate can be scratched. In fact, there is a (destructive) HDD test that the manufactures are doing (like Western Digital, they have a factory in Thailand and we used to buy HDDs from them for one of our industrial terminals) which counts how many times the head can be parked and floated again before the plate is scratched. You will be amazed of how "small" is this number! (and no, not in the context of "small numbers" RDS is thinking about :razz:). Of course, this does not count other "effects" as thermal stress (expansion), variation in the frequency of vibrations, etc.

[edit: one of my colleagues reading this says: "C'mon, in few minutes, a good HDD does not have time to stop, friction is so small that it would continue to rotate for longer time after you cut the power", I don't know if this counts for me or for you, hehe, but the head is parked, anyhow...][/QUOTE]Well I can give an anecdote (the singular of data) here. My WD "My Book" will park the heads just a few seconds after read/writes have stopped, and un-park when read/writes begin again. And after about 10 minutes of no read/writes the platters will spin down (and it only takes less than 30 seconds for the platters to stop rotating). So as far as parking is concerned it happens anyway even when the platters are not going to stop.

Well , every conversation is welcome, but somehow I cannot see how spin down and spin up of disc platters is connected with new version of Prime 95 :question::alex:

[QUOTE=pepi37;407816]Well , every conversation is welcome, but somehow I cannot see how spin down and spin up of disc platters is connected with new version of Prime 95 :question::alex:[/QUOTE]Well if we want to optimise the lifetime and reliability of our systems then we need to understand how P95 will affect the various components involved.

[QUOTE=retina;407817]Well if we want to optimise the lifetime and reliability of our systems then we need to understand how P95 will affect the various components involved.[/QUOTE]

Well, in that case it is better to know how OS works, Prime95 make one or two backup every xx minutes :)

Odd version # being logged with 28.6
 

This is probably more for George directly, but oh well... :smile:

I just noticed that in the result messages for the new 28.6 version, it has the short version of "We4". I guess that's been true for several older versions, at least back to 28.5 ?

Unfortunately that string seems to belong to "Windows64,Prime95,v26,(aka We4)"

I don't know if it makes a difference when the client itself checks in results... I do all of mine using the manual results page which parses that string to get the version # ? Seems my old auto check-ins with 28.5+ are okay, but the manually checked in stuff is either coming in with "unknown" or that v26.

I guess maybe versions past some 25.x or 26.x no longer had the old v4 "aka" string, or something like that, but the result string just uses "We4" for us manual folks?

Not a huge issue. I did do a little query to see if certain app versions had more errors than others, but the only anomalies I found were from a certain older version anyway ("Windows64,Prime95,v26.3,build 1" had more bad than good...could be more about the few people that used it than the software itself).

Oh... interim file names
 

Also, while I'm on a roll... LOL

Maybe future versions could change the filename scheme for the save files, so you don't need the secret decoder ring to figure out which save file belongs to which exponent? I puzzled out the scheme but it's too much work to figure out on the fly. I do tend to move work around, probably more than I really need to, and figuring out which file goes with which exponent is tricky.

I ended up writing a little script to look in the file itself to get the exponent and current iteration which has the benefit of telling me how far along it is from just the command line, which comes in handy.

I know that larger exponents already have just the exponent itself after the "P" so hopefully we could do that for all of them? There's really not much point these days to limit it to an 8.3 filename format, is there? If so maybe make that a new option in local.txt that people could set if they really must run it under DOS or something archaic. :no:

Is there a command line version of 28.7 for Mac OS X?

[QUOTE=Madpoo;407992]... so you don't need the secret decoder ring to figure out which save file belongs to which exponent ...[/QUOTE]Consider it a rite of passage. Part of the entry requirements into the elite club of users that can decode such arcane things in a fraction of a second without the aid of any computer technology. Where is the fun in simply spelling everything out in plain language where any old duffer could figure it out?

[size=1][color=grey]Admittedly, I am still not a member of said club. :([/color][/size]

[QUOTE=retina;409576]Consider it a rite of passage. Part of the entry requirements into the elite club of users that can decode such arcane things in a fraction of a second without the aid of any computer technology. Where is the fun in simply spelling everything out in plain language where any old duffer could figure it out?[/QUOTE]

I cheat a little... I look at the save file with a script that reads offset 0x14 for 0x28 bytes.

First 4 bytes of that block are the exponent, and then the last 4 bytes of that chunk are the current iteration. It's how I keep track (centrally) of each worker on each machine, by looking at the % done from just reading the save files. Yes... nerdy, I know, but I think it's safe to say if you're reading this, you're a nerd too. :smile:

Is it me or 28.7 version is shown as untrusted client in the CPUs page?

Forgive my stupid question: (as I am not using 28.7 yet, so I can not test it)
Did you compiled it by yourself? (i.e. without George's "funny" code?)