Superorb

That's too hot, especially for idle. Is it a 7200rpm drive?

Starting an older drive on sector 64 won't harm anything.

Thanks Joe. For some reason I thought there was a button in unMenu for preclear version, but I only found one for unMNenu version.

What is the command to print the preclear script version?

If the drives are still that warm even in front of the fan, maybe your ambient temps are too high to begin with. What is room temperature?

I'd say either buy a 5in3 cage or make sure that all of your drives are behind that single fan in front of the hard drive bays.

I wouldn't worry about it. The important things are if you've got a growing number of reallocated sectors, or if it doesn't pass the preclear. Just make sure you do the JP1 firmware before you put it into production.

^^ What case are you using, do you have any pics we can look at? You shouldn't have ANY drive running over 40C, it doesn't matter what its use will be.

It has been posted several times, but RAW numbers don't mean anything except to the manufacturer. If the script said all drives Passed you're good to go. What does it say for reallocated sectors? You might want to look at drive cooling, 39C is getting close to the 40C threshold that you don't really want to go over.

I used to only run 1 cycle, but now I run 3 cycles on all new disks and 1 cycle on disks I've been using in other PC's for a while.

I wouldn't doubt if they're the same PSU's and they just paid to certify them now. This way, they can change the packaging and charge more.

Thanks, I'll look for that.

How do you get those logs to be readable? The logs in my preclear folder are all without extensions, and when I open them in notepad it's a garbled mess. I know it's something small that I'm doing wrong.

The newer iStar's (well, certainly the BPN-340 and 350) use blue for power on, red for activity. Of course they would, especially after I ordered 3 of these guys Are you saying that the ones I purchased use red/blue light colors?

I'd be more than happy if there was an activity only light instead of a powered on light that doubles as an activity light. Maybe I'm confused, but this is how the supermicro's work. All lights off with no activty, lights on for activity. In my setup the FAIL light came on when there was a failed hard drive. On my iStar cages, the green light is always on. When there is activity, that same green light turns orange. I think this is because each slot can be individually turned on/off so they provide a light to represent which slots are powered. This light turns on if there is a drive in the slot or not and depends on the slot being turned on.

I'd be more than happy if there was an activity only light instead of a powered on light that doubles as an activity light.

One thing I don't like about the istar cages is that the activity and power on light is the same one, and it's green for power on and orange for activity. I really wish it were something like green for on and blue for activity. I'm colorblind, so I can't tell the difference between those two colors on the cage. Separate lights would also work.

Since you need to turn each slot on for the iStar cages, any slot without a light turning on is vacant.

^^ Power gremlins can cause all kinds of hard to diagnose problems that may present as a failing drive or something else. You must remember that when powering on the server all drives will spinup and stress the PSU. 7200rpm drives will finish before 5900rpm drives if their transfer rates are more than the 5900rpm drives.

It's what I had available I plan to transition to WD green drives eventually (I have two 2.0 TB EADS but those took over 30 hrs to clear... typical?). And I'm running it off a Seasonic X-650. Yes, the 30 hours is typical of a 2TB drive. At 54A on the PSU, you're pushing things running 20 drives if most of them are 7200rpm drives. Have you noticed any wonkiness yet? 54A from a 650w PSU just sounds great though. My 500w PSU cranks out 34A.

^^ I'm being curious here, but why are you using so many 7200rpm drives, and what PSU are you using to run all those power hungry drives?

^^ I believe those values over 100 are just the cryptic values that manufacturers use. I doubt your drive was above 100C, that's over 212F.

That's really weird then. Hopefully Joe or Raj can help you out as I've never used that board or drives before.

Did you change any of the settings in the BIOS, anything to do with the SATA controller?

For such similar part numbers you'd think the cages would also be similar, but sadly that's not the case. I think iStar uses the same cages and then changes the design of the caddies.