[sclug] hot drives

[Taiyo Rawle]

--- Pieter Claassen <pieter at claassen.co.uk> wrote:

> Eeeek, I am in hard drive hell!!!

Sounds familiar ;)

> A while ago I swore never to buy Maxtor ever again
> but then .....
> 
> I have two 120GB Maxtors in a soft raid config
> (actually they are plugged into 
> a cheap PCI PATA raid card but after config, the
> linux kernel still sees them 
> as two disks so I just went with soft raid).
> 
> The one disk failed the other day and I pulled two
> 250GB SATA Maxtors off my 
> shelf with a cheap Sweex SATA raid controller.
> 
> All works fine (other than once the raid array has
> been set up in the SATA 
> bios then linux still sees two drives so I just went
> with soft raid again).

Heh, I wouldn't bother with cheap HW raid 0/1/JBOD
cards as they really don't offer a fat lot of
performance increase above sw raid, and you're stuffed
if the card goes wrong and you can't find another that
uses the same format on the discs.

> My problem is that these drives run so hot
> (notwithstanding the sales burp on 
> the box stating that SATA runs cooler than PATA),
> that I cannot touch them. 
> The are not going to last a week unless they have
> titanium circuitry in them. 
> They are also separated with a 2cm air gap and good
> airflow (passive).

Man, that's worse than the olde 1.6" 10,000rpm SCSI
drives I used to have! They *really* shouldn't be that
hot, I used to have two maxtor 160GB 7200rpm SATA and
one 5400rpm PATA with only 1cm spacing, passive
cooling and they never got that hot, even when they
were being absolutely hammered for hours at a time.
Even the stack of four 200GB (seagate) SATA and one
PATA with no spacing I have now only becomes mildly
warm, although there is a slow 120mm fan cooling them.

> Does anybody have any experience with this? Seen
> this. Anything I can do short 
> of never buying a maxtor again?

What kind of cooling does the box have? The stack of
drives I was referring to lives inside a 4U rack box
with two 80mm fans and the PSU fan extracting hot air
at the back and one 120mm fan blowing cool air in from
the front (over the drive stack). They're all those
akasa "amber series" low noise jobs so they don't move
an incredible ammount of air.

Also, are the drives noisy? The modern maxtors I've
used were near silent, excessive noise often means
bearing friction, which means heat. 

HTH
-Taiyo
 
> Cheers,
> P
> 



		
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