Hard Drive Temps


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Hey All,

 

So I had another WD drive fail with 600 Write errors. This is two in 4 months. Although now I have UPgraded the parity to 1TB and most of the others are 750Gb drives now. I am actually doing a swap disable write now, It has already installed the new 1Tb parity drive and now it is doing a data rebuild on the old 750 parity drive. My temps Cooler master stacker with King-Win KF-91 enclosures. 10 drives total - Silncer 610 with the stock 3 fans in the case and one on each enclosure. I am seeing 35-40 degrees C on the top and bottom drives and the rest in the middle are 45-50 degrees. This has me a little concerned. I am wondering what temps with the Icydock 5-3, 4-3 etc or any other enclosure option. I know you guys are talking a lot about drive issues in other threads but I did not want to hi-jack those. So I am hoping for some input on this.

 

As well I am still running the P5PE-VM in this server with two promise Sata300 TX4. I am wondering what MULTI sata non raid or raid 300GB PCIe-X controller is being used productively with your setup. I was hoping to find at least an 8 port but 12 would be nice that would give me 14 in this machine.

 

Thanks,

 

Dave

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I have removable enclosures for all my IDE HD's and at idle will get between 21-25 C and 10-15 degrees higher when the drives are all spun up.  I don't think you have to worry that much about temps when it comes to the drives.  What you do have to consider is how often these drives spin up and down.  I believe that's where most of you wear and tear will come from.  As for you having 2 drives fail within 4 months just bad luck.....

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Cooler master stacker with King-Win KF-91 enclosures

What I did not like about the cooler master stacker is the left hand door and the right hand motherboard vent.

Although you can put a fan on the door, the rest of the grill is all open as is the right hand.

 

I try to design my cases so that there is no "free" are except where I want it to come from.

It's all directed. I had contemplated taping up the grills and making the side fan an exhaust fan.

This would make the only intake through the drives.

Don't know if this will work for you, on different case it worked for me.

 

the 4 in 3 or 5 in 3's may be better for you as it will have more air pull and the drives are not so enclosed.

Then again, you may get away with blocking certain vents and insuring you have good string exhaust fans.

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Hey All,

 

Well both drives that failed were WD;s and less then 1.5 yrs old. When the last drive failed, I completely tore the system down replaced some fans and installed a new silencer 610 replacing the TRIO 650 which I had to butcher by adding supplied sata pwr connectors punchdowns. I also installed a APC 900 on that system at the same time and all was good until yesterday with this 5000KS RED light stoppage.

 

I agree with the air floating all over the case and have thought about that in the past and will look into it further but I want to get these temps down. I am wondering if something else is happening as I stated before. I did swap disable last evening at 9PM, installed a 1Tb in place of the 750 for parity and then the 750 to replace the 500 fialed drive, it copied parity and expanded the 1Tb all good, then started the Data rebuild I was surprise to see it at only 22% when I woke up a 6am this morning. I had to go out this morning and when I got home and checked things out the server was off, I turned it on and check and now it is starting the data rebuild process again. Confused.

 

Dave

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I have removable enclosures for all my IDE HD's and at idle will get between 21-25 C and 10-15 degrees higher when the drives are all spun up.  I don't think you have to worry that much about temps when it comes to the drives.  What you do have to consider is how often these drives spin up and down.  I believe that's where most of you wear and tear will come from.  As for you having 2 drives fail within 4 months just bad luck.....

 

That google study was flawed.  Temperature does play a part, cooler is better.  The other conclusion drawn is correct though, the constant spinning up and down.  If you can only choose one or the other, having a drive run a bit warmer and staying spun up is probably better for its lifespan.  Regardless, keeping the drives as cool as possible with airflow is a good thing (keeping them cool by aggressively spinning down whenever possible, not as good).

 

I would prefer to see temps in the 30s or 40s Celsius, but I wouldn't worry too much about 50.  Now, the OP said that temps are higher in the middle than elsewhere.  Are the drives that keep dying always in the middle?  If so, then ignore what I said about not worrying much about temps around 50, there could be a pattern developing here.  If the drives that failed were in different locations (some in the cool spot, some in the hot spot), then temperature most likely didn't play a big part in their untimely demise.

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Consider what I said about using clear packing tape to cover the external vents.

Then making sure all fans are exhaust only and running full.

I think the side of the case needs tape for that big circular vent and just leaving the fan (as exhaust) exposed.

 

This has the large fans assisting the smaller fans.

Watch your motherboard temps too.

 

If it's no good, you can always peel off the tape.

Also, do you have an open vented front panel piece, if so I might tape that up too.

 

If this doesn't work, then you may consider the 5 in 3s as they have a stronger fan or atleast a switch to set the fan speed to high.

 

Personally I've not had too many issues with the enclosed removables.

But then again, I had the copper RH-32's, and 3 80MM fans running at 3000rpm for exhaust.

Even when the 40mm fans died, the drives stayed cool enough to run without allot of failures.

They ran 24x7 with no air conditioning in the summer.

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So my drives are stacked from top down parity then 1-9. disk 3456 are all over 45 degress and 12789 are all 32 to 37 degrees C. I just put a small fan in front of the mahine pushing some air across the center drives and now the temps on all the drives have dropped a min of 5-7 degrees. I would say that the small fans in the enclosures are not pulling any air.

 

Once this drive finishes rebuilding I will build a dam of fans behind the drive cages like in a rack mount tower to help pull the air through the cages and then seal up any other leaks.

 

thanks

 

Dave

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Before doing that build of a dam, you might be able to just block certain aiir holes and add more exhaust fans.

I had 8 drives, some of them 10,000 RPMs and this worked for me. It's only a lil tape and two more fans if your case supports it.

If that don't work, then build the dam! LOL.

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That google study was flawed.

 

I agree with this based on my (anecdotal) experience, but have not read any factual discrediting of the study.  Is this your opinion, or based on something official?

 

Temperature does play a part, cooler is better.  The other conclusion drawn is correct though, the constant spinning up and down.  If you can only choose one or the other, having a drive run a bit warmer and staying spun up is probably better for its lifespan.  Regardless, keeping the drives as cool as possible with airflow is a good thing (keeping them cool by aggressively spinning down whenever possible, not as good).

 

I agree with this (personally).  I have active cooling on every drive, and they wake up from spindown at 17-20C, and reach 27-30C when spun up and reading/writing continuously.

 

I would prefer to see temps in the 30s or 40s Celsius, but I wouldn't worry too much about 50.  Now, the OP said that temps are higher in the middle than elsewhere.  Are the drives that keep dying always in the middle?  If so, then ignore what I said about not worrying much about temps around 50, there could be a pattern developing here.  If the drives that failed were in different locations (some in the cool spot, some in the hot spot), then temperature most likely didn't play a big part in their untimely demise.

 

I would not advise running drives hotter than about 45C.  At 50C I'd power down my system and invest in better cooling.  If I was going to run them hot (25C+ hotter than spun down), I try hard to keep them spinning down unless they were going to stay spun down for a nice long time (at least overnight, maybe longer).

 

BTW, based on the study I have raisied by timeout for spindown from 1 hour to 4 hours.  It is now uncommon for any of my drives to spinup/down more than once a day.

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