richard wrote:
> In article < vpadnVkUKdnZskvYnZ2dnUVZ_uejnZ2d@metroca
stcablevision.com>,
> billtodd@metrocast.net opined thusly:
> 
>
> Without voiding the warranty how can you know?  If the air is cool it is
> either missing the drive or doing a good job.  If the air is warm

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
> either doing its job...or not, it may still be insufficient to keep the
> bearing and surface temperatures down.  But a 1" fan in an enclosed space
> where there's no mechanical heatsinking, intuitively, isn't going to cut it.[/vbco
l]

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).

...
[vbcol=seagreen]
> Well the purpose of my post was to find out if I'm not alone in my
> experiences.  Citing the above example, that brand is just going to fail o
ver
> and over - but only I guess for users who give it a duty cycle that's
> light enough to keep its temp down.

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).

...
 
>
> Any suggestions?  How about this S.M.A.R.T. software, does it slow down ac
cess
> time?  Any recommendations on whose to use?

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

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