<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div></div><div>We shut down our consoles (Gio, Ion, Express) every night; our spaces are small, and booths are within easy reach. Dimmer racks stay powered up to avoid wear on the disconnects.</div><div><br></div><div>Our Obsession 1s would occasionally forget their show info when turned off for a few weeks (or sooner, if due for a new logic board battery or capacitors). The manual even specified that the desks should be run for at least 7 hours every 28 days to avoid memory loss. Reloading a show file from the hard disk was not a big deal, but reconfiguring DMX port settings was a bit annoying--if the port settings didn't match those in the show file, the desk would dump all dimmer doubling info from the patch.</div><div><br></div><div>The last time I recall being warned about not powering down a hard disk was in the early '90s; seems the first generation of 1GB drives were more vulnerable to suffering a stiction-related failure than smaller models <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiction">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiction</a></div><div><br></div><div><div>--<div>Mike Voytko</div><div>Lighting & Sound Supervisor</div><div>TSOA Theatrical Production</div><div>New York University</div><div><a href="mailto:mv35@nyu.edu">mv35@nyu.edu</a></div><div><br></div></div>On Nov 23, 2015, at 10:36 PM, Richard John Archer via Stagecraft <<a href="mailto:stagecraft@theatrical.net">stagecraft@theatrical.net</a>> wrote:<br><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><span>Was visiting someplace (a college) a while ago and they often left their board on during the rehearsal and run of a show.....yes 24/7 for about two weeks. Is there some reason for this? I've seen it done with special events that were a few days but nothing usually this long.</span><br></div></blockquote></body></html>