On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Neal Pollack <neal.poll...@sun.com> wrote:
> > Luck or "design/usage" ? > Let me explain; I've also had many drives fail over the last 25 > years of working on computers, I.T., engineering, manufacturing, > and building my own PCs. > > Drive life can be directly affected by heat. Many home tower designs, > until the last year or two, had no cooling fans or air flow where > the drives mount. I'd say over 80% of desktop "average" PCs do > not have any cooling or air flow for the drive. > (I've replaced many many for friends). > [HP small form factor desktops are the worst offenders > in what I jokingly call "zero cooling design" :-) > Just look at the quantity of refurbished ones offered for sale] > > Once I started adding cooling fans for my drives in my own > workstations I build, the rate of drive failures went > down by a lot. The drive life went up by a lot. > > You can still have random failures for a dozen reasons, but > heat is one of the big killers. I did some experiments over > the last 5 years and found that ANY amount of air flow makes > a big difference. If you run a 12 volt fan at 7 volts by > connecting it's little red and black wires across the outside > of a disk drive connecter (red and orange wires, 12 and 5 volt, difference > is 7), then the fan is silent, moves a small flow of air, and drops > the disk drive temperature by a lot. > [Translation: It can be as quiet as a dell, but twice as good > since you built it :-) ] > > That said, there are some garbage disk drive designs on the market. > But if a lot of yours fail early, close to warranty, they might > be getting abused or run near the max design temperature? > > Neal > I've always cooled my drives. I just blame it on MAXTOR having horrible designs. Funny, everyone bagged on the 75GXP's from IBM, but I had a pair that I bought when they first came out, used them for 5 years, then sold them to a friend who got at least another 3 years out of them (heck, he might still be using them for all I know). Those maxtor's weren't worth the packaging they came in. I wasn't sad to see them bought up. --Tim
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