Re: Hard drive Reliability?

[Sevatio <sevatio@atella.com>]

> One thing I've come to believe over the years is that heat is a very important 
> factor that's killing drives.  So I now take great care in ensuring good heat 
> dissipation from the drives. This entails amongst others that you should 
> never 'sandwich' drives in their 3,5" slots (I can't believe case 
> manufacturers still have not woken up to this need!). Instead I often arrange 
> for them to go in 5,25" slots so they have plenty of air around. If I need to 
> put them in 3,5" slots I always leave 1 unit space around a drive.
> In the servers I deploy I take bigger measures, like a bigass 120mm fan just 
> in front of the drives (accomplished either by dremel or by case design)
> 
> Maarten
> 

I employ the same methods now by mounting harddrives in the 5.25" bays
and placing fans in front of them.  HDs that are sandwiched together in
the 3.5" bays get too hot to touch whereas fanned 5.25" HDs are barely
above room temperature.  This seemed to have helped.  I haven't had a
failure of a HD that's mounted in this manner yet (these have run 24x7
for the last 1.5years).  I've even seen HD heatsink kits.  It all boils
down to the extreme tight margins that hardware mfgs operate.  They're
forced cut corners where possible.  We just need to be as informed as
possible and intelligently vote with our wallets.

Sevatio