27 Jan
2010
27 Jan
'10
9:41 p.m.
fons said:
On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 05:06:44PM -0500, David
Santamauro wrote:
Power and thermal cycles can be more damaging than just
leaving things switched on. On first consideration it
may seem less 'green'. OTOH, if your equipment survives
longer before becoming toxic waste that helps as well.
Good info, except in the case of the delta 1010.
They have a history of over-heating and drying out the capacitors in the power supply in
the external box.
I don't have mine hooked up right now, but I used it for years before. We got one
just before alsa supported the evny chip that the delta uses*. It was one of the first
ones to burn out one of it's power supply caps. After taking it apart, tracing the
circuit, understanding the problem, and replacing the caps; I posted info on it here a
long time ago. Others have picked the info up, added and distilled it into an easy to
understand fix if the caps go bad.
If the delta 1010 is getting really hot then leaving the external unit powered on will
shorten it's lifetime quite a bit.
When I
plug mine in, turning it on, the device tends to get warm
pretty fast, which leads me to believe that perhaps after prolonged
periods of time it might get very hot.
Mine is on pretty much 24/7. Heat has never been an issue. From what I remember, the external unit powers down to
a reasonable "heat' level when the computer it's plugged into is turned off;
so that helps. Plugging the external's supply into a switched AC supply and leaving
it off until it's needed seemed to work fine also.
I ended up mounting a small, quiet, 12v fan behind the external box on it's PS end.
The fan was powered by a small 6 volt "wall wart" stile supply that was plugged
into the outlet strip that the external box used(along with other sound equipment).
*about alsa back then:
I was _so_ glad when the delta was finally supported in alsa. I remember downloading and
building the drivers for every new kernel that I used. I had wanted to use the oss
drivers for the card, but the oss devs seemed to have big money in their eyes; thinking
that they could charge big bucks for drivers for the card. What really turned me off was
the total cost just to get the 1010 running on linux with their drivers; somewhere very
close to what a windows license cost at the time! Now, when I see the oss guy come onto
the list defending oss, or badmouthing alsa; I just shake my head and ignor them for
introducing such a sad problem into linux so early on.
Tracey