[Beowulf] Mobo battery life in constantly on systems?

[richard karhuse]

> Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2007 16:14:20 -0700
> From: "David Mathog" <mathog at caltech.edu>
> Subject: [Beowulf] Mobo battery life in constantly on systems?
> To: beowulf at beowulf.org
> 
> The question: what is the expected motherboard battery lifetime in
> systems that are continuously on?
> 

While this may not apply to your situation... it is interesting ...

I was involved on a project that was building an appliance
and needed certain BIOS setting to support SATA and Linux.
All was going fine, units were being built and sent to
customers, etc.

Then, a number of units were loosing their BIOS settings --
mostly after just being shipped to the customer. But, batteries
were fresh, holder and contacts, etc. looked good ...

To make a long, agonizing story short ...  it turned out
that the motherboard manufacturer claimed that one vendor
batteries were the source of the problem and starting using
a different vendor.  Problem hasn't been seen again once
the (good!) batteries were swapped out / used in production.

Never did get a good "technical" explanation as to why this
"fixed" the problem.  However, I found it very curious that
this vendor claimed that they had seen this issue before on
a different motherboard (completely different design/CPU) and
it took them so long to apply that knowledge to our case.
So, it is not a one-time "event" / design issue.

Again, probably not your cause, but it is interesting that
"standard" CMOS batteries are not all the same ...

    Rich