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Could be very expensive; find out how much your computer is using when playing the game on SETA for 1 hour... then multiply that by how many hours you intend leaving it. Mulitply that by how many days you will do this to find out how much more it will add to your parents bills - can they afford that extra cost? Will you feel guilty if your extra game time mean mum or dad gets really worried about the elctricity billl? My own machine cost approx 5p per hour so 10 hours is 50p - not too much but x that by 30 days ands it is £15 - x that by 12 months it's £180. If I leave mine on a day it costs £1.1
2] Wear & tear on your machine. Some parts of your machine like the HD wil wear out faster.
3] NPC Stations have been known to kick your ships out of dock when you leave them in too long.
4] It is preferable to find another way of creating something useful while you are waiting for teh complex to make money. Go look at Bartering - fly your playership to a station and see what teh local traders want to buy. Then fly it in from elswher and strike deals. Can be great fun and can make lots of credits.
What in the bloody hell are you talking about in first two paragraphs? Jeez, mate, "Wear and tear your machine" - what a load of bollocks. It's common for PCs working 24/7 and they are all made for it, they'll be just fine doing that as long as they're well maintained. No need to be so "soft" to your PCs uptime.
And as for electricity - you've got the point, but it's cheap as dirt in most of the countries anyway, to the point of extra cost not even being relevant.
All OP asked was about SETA affecting the game and surrounding sectors.
See the Egosoft FAQ here: http://www.egosoft.com/support/faq/faq_answer_en.php?answer=1129&version=9&sid=92096bf15bed923878191452dc9a7442
So depending if you ever want to try for the achievements for X-treme fight and trade rank, this might not be a good idea.
You are incorrect. Perhaps even to the point of being naiive.
First look up MTBF & CDL. Then work out how many hours actual running is involved. There are many factors that impact on MTBF too. One major factor is the increasing use of inferior materials with a limited life that will not ususally be known to the Retailer let alone the customer.
If an MTBF is 50k hours then the life of that product MAY average out at approx 5 Years of running time. An example of explanations are offered by Western Digital one of teh biggest HD manufaturers... you may want to learn that before you accuse people so damningly
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/665/~/how-drive-reliability-is-measured-and-the-mtbf-of-wd-drives
Second - do you know how much electrictiy costs where the OP lives?
Finally he is not the bill payer.
So unless YOU are paying for his bills I suggest you not jump on me for drawing that aspect to his attention. You may enjoy cheap electricity; for a growing number of us it is not only getting more expensive it is getting so at a time when incomes are dropping.
You wouldn't happen to be working in the power supply industry would you?
The heck are you on? £180 a year can tip a family over the edge, I've seen it happen. Clearly you're some brat with no sense of responsibility... For many families especially now, just £20 could do it. Especially the way energy companies farm profits from their customers around now.
Plus computers still suffer wear and tear, even a well maintained pc will suffer wear and tear, infact the whole point of maintining a computer is because wear and tear happens.
Though now more to the op.
I'm not sure about newer computers, but on older computers, the longer you leave seta on for and the higher it's setting is the more likely your game is to crap out on you. It's fine f you've got a good up today compie but if you're barely meeting requirements then Try to not have it on unless you need it. I've tested this many times, leaving it on less when you can keeps the game just that little bit more stable long term.
First of all, I haven't really accused you of anything, though, I may have been a little harsh, it happens and I apologize for that. However, I wouldn't recommend you accusing anyone of not knowing anything on a subject either, let alone calling them naiive. I don't tend to talk out of my ass, y'know. I build PCs for people, so such knowledge is quite useful, after all.
That being said, I am aware of hard drive efficiency rates dependant on materials used and on the overall load. However, I think you took it to a little too big scale on that one. I doubt that OP would be running SETA for years, honestly. That would be a little too excessive, to say the least. And, after all, I didn't say that PCs don't wear out, they obviously do, but the way you put it was as if PCs wear out in a year or somethin'.
On topic of electricity prices, I agree that I wasn't quite right there. Prices do indeed vary on quite a big scale in different countries. But then again, I doubt OP would be running SETA 24/7 for extensive periods of time.
At the end, I think, you took it too excessively on first two paragraphs, that's all I meant. If I misunderstood you in any way, feel free to point it out.
As I mentioned, I was wrong about electiricity prices in my previous posts. Though, you do seem to like making false and timely conclusions (some brat with no sense of responsibility, to be precise), don't you? Well, let me tell you that you are wrong. I am aware of economical problems that happen in families, but honestly, it's not really that difficult to manage family budget based on stable income/expenses (I.E. bills). It is much more difficult to manage unstable expenses, however (when something breaks, an accident happens, someone gets sick, etc.). At the end, if a paying family member, with all the information available in 21st century, fails at a simple task as managing stable expenses - there is something wrong, let me tell ya. That's just my point of view, nothing more. That being said, I really wouldn't recommend to make timely conclusions about people, especially on the internet and Steam forums, where you basically don't know literally anything about the one you're posting towards.
Anyway, I went completely off-topic here, honestly.
And yes, as I mentioned in my previous responce, computers do wear and tear, but there is no need to blow off every dust particle off of 'em, just saying.
Basically you accused me of talking bollocks... never mind I accept your apology.
Evidently without a full understanding of wear & tear. You might want to research ... then ask yourself why does Western Digitnal offer only a limited warranty that comes in at way below the example I gave above? 3 year warranty devided by [24 hrs x 365 days ... or ... 8760 hrs] = 26280 or about half the MTBF of 50k hours they used to offer.
So I am not accusing you of not knowing anything, but it would appear that you are out of your depth with this matter.
No I didn't. Some years ago with an MTBF of 500k hours many manufacturers realised that HD's in teh real market place are treated very variably. That 500k hours was based upon optimum tempurature; humidity; vibration and physical track seeks. As a compromise with the real world some manufaturers then gave 50k MTBF.
Nope, I even gave you the equation to assess the average failure time for an HD as an example. However, in teh real world the failure rate is sometimes wildly either side of that MTBF. I had one supurb SCSI drive that lasted more than 8 years of constant running... I finally let it retire during an upgrade. No doubt I could still run it despite its 70k age. I've also had several drives that failed after only 2 years or approx 17k hours.. significantly all teh same design batches and incidentally all designed for RAID systems so they are meant to offer optimal CDL.
Temperature and air pressure fluctuations make a large difference in the number of 'soft' errors recorded to a drive error table. Once the firimware error table is full the drive will tell you it is dead.
They use the Componant Design Life or CDL so they can use cheaper products that will not stand up to longer term usage. Effedctively a planned redundancy. So treating teh drives with care is even more important. What is not immediately clear is that the MTBF and CDL is for a drive model or family... so an individual can't expect their drive to last the 100k+ hours some manufacturers claim. If they bought 1,000 of those drives and replaced them at 5 years then they might expect 1 drive to fail at about 1000 hours.
Shouldn't hurt your business too much though as most PC gamers want to upgrade their machines more often than once every 5 years so wear and tear is only going to hurt them if they cram 5 years worth of estimated up time into a shorter period. Ooops that's what the OP is doing.
The OP asked if there is a downside to leaving SETA on. There are several as has already been amply covered above. I mentioned the wear and tear almost as an aside, but it can be far more a factor than you seem to realise, even now. For all you know the OP may be keeping an old machine alive.
Games run on Operating Systems, in X3's case Windows. Also he is very likely to be running it through Steam too. So there is background caching. The drive will be constantly spun up but incredible as may appear to you... the heads will also likely be more active than during a rendering process as the blocks the heads are addressing are less likely to be contiguous. Most such rendering is done from one drive to another so as to minimise HD wear and increase throughput as the head only needs to move sequentially on both HD's. HD's built for Survellance scenarios tend to have extra firmware to smooth the process. But they may not take too kindly to typical PC usage. [I've not actaully tested that]
You have also not considered that his machine may be doing more of teh graphics rendering in software rather than a GPU card. Again requiring caching.
A few years ago a freind of mine in Alaska asked why he had to replace his HD's more than some of his neighbours. After asking him a few questions I realised he was leaving his machine switched off overnight in a cold part of his home. Affter relocating his machine into a warmer part of teh house he found drives lasted lasted longer. The temperature gradiant when switching on was causeing excessive wear. Another freind in Florida was 'listening in' and realised the humidity gradiant was more a factor to him. Both were only using the machines as email stations and small business accounts.
So whilst on paper it should not matter. Neither of us know what the OP's home's humidity and temperature or electricity costs. So my advice in my first post was a measured response based upon experiance. Not a lab technicians's response. I have only expanded on the issue because of your challenge and as I suspect a few readers may be interested and teh OP already has his answer well catered for.
However, enough has been said. I don't really blame you for not knowing this sort of thing in sufficient depth. That is no insult, as I have gleaned my experience direct from manufacturers in response to their hardware failing in my business. I've worked with HD's partly as a hobby since the days of ST-506 drives then later with ESDI drives for RAID. My inner nerd finds them fascinating ;)
If anyone interested goes to the Western Digital site >>http://www.wdc.com/en/
then clicks on Internal Storage you will see several types of drive offered. The explanations of teh differences could be of interest. But if you read between teh lines you see that the different scenarios makes different demands.
Look, mate, it's not about me not knowing the subject in sufficient depth, which is not true in a first place. It's about you using unecessary, overelaborated information that is not very relevant to the topic and is far beyond what was necessary in a first place. As interesting all this is, as true it is, it is simply useless when it comes to matter at hand.
At the end, there is one simple fact: If OP will run the game all day (not 24/7, just usual 10+ hours uptime) for couple days, it won't freakin' hurt his PCs hard drive in any way, it really is as simple as that. PCs run like that all the time and while your information is interesting and is all that well elaborated, it is simply irrelevant, as I mentioned in several posts already. Y'know, the way you're explaining all that is as if you were explaining and mathenatically calculating a freaking trajectory of sugar while adding it into the cup of tea, if you catch what I'm sayin'. Not always you need to actually concentrate on smallest aspects of environment, or a state the equipment is in. We are not maintaining a server on Mars or a NAS storage for a LHC data, ok? While this stuff is interesting to us, there is no need to create walls of text in response to threads with simple questions.
And that is not to mention that everything you explained about caching, hard drive usage by the system and background applications, even the way hard drive works (and why in the bloody hell did you need to explain that?), could've been explained in much more simple way, there is no need to overcomplicate simple things.
I do admire your passion on the subject, though.
Of 5 people who answered on this thread 4 have tried to help you with game advice and more. As I said in my last post 'enough said'...
Wear and tear happens but you're more likely to damage a component on your computer by turning it off and on daily than if you were to leave it running 24/7. All other complications aside, you're going to be in a bigger hole replacing your power supply or sending your HD in for repairs than spending a few extra bucks on electricity.
As for the original topic, I'd suggest cheating yourself a bunch of credits if that's all you want because you're doing yourself more harm than good by exploting SETA for massive amounts of time. It's really just the sensible way to "get a bunch of stuff without playing the game".