Re: Hard drive Reliability?

[Russ Price <rjp_raid@fubegra.net>]

Guy wrote:
> I have an old system with 2 18 Gig SCSI disks.  One IBM and one Seagate.
> Both run very hot!  I added extra cooling fans.  Both fans failed about 2
> years ago.  Only the CPU and power supply fans still work.   The disk drives
> are too hot to touch.  Much too hot to touch!  The system is running 99.99%
> of the time.  No disk problems.  The system is 4-5 years old as a guess.  To
> help date it, it is a P3-350Mhz.  My wife uses this computer.  :)

The lack of start-stop cycles may work in your favor; you don't have as 
many thermal expansion/contraction cycles or startup electrical surges 
to worry about.  Of course, if stiction strikes after a power-off, you 
could be in trouble...

In any case, it's not a bad idea to set up smartd and look after your 
system logs.  If your drives have temperature sensors, it's a good idea 
to tell smartd to report raw values for temperature (usually -r 194 -R 
194 in the smartd.conf file); the normalized values look wacky.

I also have hddtemp and the hddtemp plugin for gkrellm, so I can easily 
check the temperatures on my desktop, at least for my four-drive SATA 
RAID5 array.  My older 30GB Maxtors don't have temperature sensors, but 
they're in the same fan-cooled bays as the Samsung SATA drives, and they 
all run reasonably cool to the touch.  Current room temperature is about 
28 C, and the temperature display reports 29-33 C for the drives in the 
array.

	Russ