How old is your DAW computer?

[graveleye]

My main DAW is only about 3 years old, but I still have a completely functioning 001 rig, complete with XP that I built around 2004. The thing still works like a charm, but I only use it for tape transfers and whatnot these days.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by graveleye

My main DAW is only about 3 years old, but I still have a completely functioning 001 rig, complete with XP that I built around 2004. The thing still works like a charm, but I only use it for tape transfers and whatnot these days.

Win XP eh? How small is your total ram usage for XP? When I ran my Sonar 3/5/8 Producer system I got it down to just about 100 meg total.

[Wizzoboy]

I've had my Dell for 7 of it's 11 years of service.

[EGS]

Originally Posted by albee1952

... As for failures, spinning drives are the thing that fail most often here, followed by power supplies In the last 16 years, I've lost 1 graphics card, 2 power supplies, 1 motherboard and probably 6 spinning drives.

I'm not terribly worried about drive failures; I have backups. However, do you suggest preemptively replacing other internal parts as a hedge against failure? Which parts? I'd like to run my 2010 DAW build for another couple of years. Thanks !!!

[mjslakeridge]

I don't think it makes sense to preemptively replace parts on an 8 year old build. There is no way to predict which part might fail. A single capacitor on the motherboard might fail. The only parts I would even consider replacing are those you could use on your next build, like the PSU or HDD/SSDs.

Your current build could last for many more years, or die tomorrow. The best bet would be to have a spare PT rig that you could put into temporary service while you put together your next build. (It looks like you do have a spare with the desktop and laptop available).

[albee1952]

Originally Posted by mjslakeridge

I don't think it makes sense to preemptively replace parts on an 8 year old build. There is no way to predict which part might fail. A single capacitor on the motherboard might fail. The only parts I would even consider replacing are those you could use on your next build, like the PSU or HDD/SSDs.

Your current build could last for many more years, or die tomorrow. The best bet would be to have a spare PT rig that you could put into temporary service while you put together your next build. (It looks like you do have a spare with the desktop and laptop available).

I agree^^^ The best thing you can do(and what everybody SHOULD do) is be diligent about backing up sessions(to more than 1 place) and keep a large external drive that holds nothing but drive images of your system drive. My system drive strategy includes 2 externals for drive images(I've been on this a long time) and I rotate 3 500GB SSD drives for system. 1 is the current newest version of PT, 1 is the previous build and the 3rd is a clone of either of the others. The only hassle I deal with is authorizations of stuff that don't do iLok or the Waves USB stick. Every time I hear someone whine about iLok, I chuckle because I curse every time I deal with non-iLok stuff. I just quit using Cytomic's The Glue because of their authorization crap(they give 3 per year, but I have burned all 3 in a day due to authorizations dropping for a simple drive swap)

[EGS]

Originally Posted by albee1952

... be diligent about backing up sessions(to more than 1 place) and keep a large external drive that holds nothing but drive images of your system drive...

+1 for multiple backups of everything, incl system drive

I'm asking about typical expected lifespan/failure rate of:
motherboard
power supply
CPU
RAM
video card

Thanks !!!

[musicman691]

One of the best bets for preemptively taking care of things is to have a good ups/power filtering system. Don't depend on anything in a simple power strip either. Yes I have a power strip but I also have plugged into that APC power centers that do surge and noise filtering and for the computer and external drives I have an APC ups that completely regenerates the incoming AC power. BTW the reason for the power strip is it gives me a single point to disconnect everything from incoming AC.

You'd be surprised how dirty incoming AC power is even here in the US. Not to mention all the emi/rfi crap that's around.

You think this is overkill? You should see the system I have set up to protect my ham radio equipment (radios and antennas).

[simonjewel]

Originally Posted by Ben Jenssen

2008 Mac Pro 3,1 Harpertown 4-core 2,8kHz.
3 HDD
1 SSD:
Partition1: OS X 10.6.8, PT 10.3.10. for DAW work.
Partition2: Mac OS Sierra 10.12.5 for everything else.

Running smooth as ever.
The SSD upgrade gave it new life.

(The regular Sierra installer won't install on this mac, but I found a hack on the web.)

How's Sierra running on your Mac Ben, is it stable? Also I don't suppose you'd care to share the hack you found to install it would you?

[Ben Jenssen]

Originally Posted by simonjewel

How's Sierra running on your Mac Ben, is it stable? Also I don't suppose you'd care to share the hack you found to install it would you?

I've had it running for a couple of months now, and it's as stable as anything since OS X 10.2! Feels as snappy and smooth as ever.

The only two things I've not been able to solve is hardware related: my Apogee FW Duet have occasional minuscule clicks, and it seems my graphics card (original ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256) have occasional dropouts lasting a second or less. Both these things are so rare that I can live with them no problem on my home everyday mac. When I boot from my SnowLeopard (for PT10) or Lion partition, they go away.

It won't upgrade, until someone makes a new installer with a new patch. I tried upgrade from the App Store and it refused because of hardware incompatibility.

I've not been able to retrace where I got it from.

I'm afraid I can't remember the exact details of the installation, I thought that there might have been more to it than just running the installer from another disk, like some custom procedure, but now I'm not shure. I still have the .dmg with which I installed sierra. 5.5GB, and no accompying special instructions. Very unlike me to not archive those, if they existed.

So I checked; I just now mounted the dmg, opened the installer (it was in norwegian as I am that), and it checked my mac's compatibility, OK'ed it and everything was ready to install. So I'm pretty shure that if you have a mac pro 3.1 and run this installer, it will read in english, and it will work.

Now, if you would suggest a way to make this 5,5GB available to you, I would be more than happy to do so. (Like, WeTransfer free has a 2GB limit…)