| richard 2007-02-18, 1:15 am |
| In article <wPednQu- foK860rYnZ2dnUVZ_silnZ2d@metrocastcablev
ision.com>,
Thanks for that info Bill. OK since the Maxtor external drive I have on my
home PC is out of warranty I just opened it up. Drive is suspended on
neoprene(?) shock mounts. The only metal-to-case contact is via a copper
earthing strip. Ventilation is a few square cm at the front and perhaps one sq
cm at the back. Fan? Nil. This is going to cook - esp as it ages.
billtodd@metrocast.net opined thusly:
>
>richard wrote:
>
>Actually, the air shouldn't be more than luke-warm, because then the
>disk would be even warmer. Moving air feels cooler than still air, so
>if the disk is, say, 12 - 14 degrees C. above room temperature (as my
>Seagates seem to tend to run; a couple of WDs that I checked ran a
>little warmer) the exhaust air (at a slightly lower temperature) should
>barely feel warm at all.
>
> it is
>
>Our intuitions differ, then (or perhaps it's the disks we're used to
>using - mine tend to run only slightly warm to the touch).
>
>...
>
over[vbcol=seagreen]
>
>Heavy seek loads are the worst. Video loads tend to use long accesses
>with relatively few seeks: while the disk head still has to follow the
>track, far less heat should be generated (I'd tend to suspect much
>closer to an idle level than to a heavy-seeking level).
>
>...
>
access[vbcol=seagreen]
>
>Modern disks include firmware that monitors their own operation and
>health, one of the outputs being their internal temperature. S.M.A.R.T.
>monitoring software just interrogates the disk to get that information
>out of it: there's no overhead at all save at the times you ask the
>disk a question (which shouldn't be that often unless you want to use
>the software to monitor temperatures for unusual changes rather than
>simply check them occasionally).
>
>I use a small free utility called Dtemp from
>http://private.peterlink.ru/tochinov/ and just start it up once in a
>while to see how things are doing (it reports a lot of other S.M.A.R.T.
>attributes too - Seagate drives are a little strange, since they come
>from the factory with non-zero values for some failing-health
>indicators, according to another S.M.A.R.T. utility from Adenix that I
>use less often). A quick look around turned up some other free
>utilities but none that could work through a USB connection (still
>hoping that someone here knows of one) - nor did the few paid-for
>utilities that I encountered claim to do so.
>
>- bill
|