From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Russ Price Subject: Re: Hard drive Reliability? Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 17:27:56 -0500 Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <40AD30EC.9070809@fubegra.net> References: <200405200034.i4K0YpB17310@www.watkins-home.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <200405200034.i4K0YpB17310@www.watkins-home.com> To: 'LinuxRaid' List-Id: linux-raid.ids 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