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I'm setting my mining rig on Ubuntu x13.10 AMD64 up to lose power about 5 times a day

Those of us all can remember a time long ago when you'd get your hand slapped if you shut down a computer by the power switch, nowadays such quirks have been worked out and complete filesystem corruption from power loss is mostly gone.

This led me to think about how true this remains.......

1--I'll have an outlet like Belkin WeMo (simple approach) or an Arduino controlled relay (if I get motivated) cycle power on the rig a few times a day,

2--the BIOS is set to power right back on at power loss,

3--my mining program cgminer starts automatically when Ubuntu boots.

Killing the system from 1400w w/ 7 graphics cards running at 100% however many times a day, will the power cycling gradually degrade performance of any component?

(I know, there exists a code-driven solution, a simple one too. But I leave town often, and hard hangs happen more often than not- which require an AC hard reset to get going again. I dont want to be stuck out of town for a week not mining because of this.)

More info on my setup if its pertinent:

--Ubuntu 13.10 AMD 64

--ASUS M5A97 LE R2.0 MOBO

--5ea XFX Radeon 7850 cards

--2ea Gigabyte R9 280X cards

--1300w Rosewill Lightning PSU

--[edit] also, OS installed to USB thumb drive

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In addition to the obvious data loss ( your work on the current block problem is lost ), and the less obvious possible data loss ( depending on how the miner writes to the block chain file on disk, it could corrupt the file ), the hard drive can have trouble from sudden power loss for two reasons:

  1. If the power fails in the middle of writing a sector, it will be corrupt and reading it will result in a "bad sector". This can be corrected by forcibly writing fresh data to the sector, but this requires manual intervention.

  2. Sudden loss of power causes the drive to do an emergency head retract, which is more violent than a clean shutdown. Drives are only rated to handle so many of these before they are likely to break.

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  • +1, if the head slams down on the HD platters this can also cause pitting of the platters that will cause even more issues. even in places with reliable power, a UPS(uninterrupted power supply, ie battery backup) is a good investment. I have a minimal one, I spent about $50 US while it only gives me ten minutes of power, I can survive power blinks or can safely shut down my computer. The UPS also will absorb power spikes so that they do not get to my system. (note this info was more for the OP than clarification)
    – TrailRider
    Jan 5, 2014 at 19:02
  • I should have noted that the OS runs from a USB thumb drive. The miner is connected to a mining pool, thus doesn't need to save/write data to computer. I figure losing a few shares preventatively is better than losing a day or more's work.
    – rellimmot
    Jan 5, 2014 at 19:16

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