Hard Drive Questions

[SuperW2]

Two of them acutally

 

1) @ What Temp should I get worried about my HD's?  I see upper 40's and some 50-52 is if I have been doing a lot of activity...

 

2) I currently have 10 Drives (9+Parity) of varying sizes for something between 3.5-4TB... I'm filling that fast and still have a lot of DVD's to scan... I have a couple newer 750 GB PATA drives that are not purposed for anything else right now that I would like to add at least until I can get a 3rd 5-in-3 SATA Backplane and some newer SATA Drives (which might be a while).  Should I even mess with the PATA drives, or will there be enough difference in speeds between the SATA drives I have now and the PATA drives that I might not want to do this?

 

Thanks

SW2

[limetech]

1) First, drive temps should be taken with "grain of salt" because it might not be all that accurate, and the temp sensor location varies among drive manufacturers.  That said, your temperatures are probably ok below mid-50's.  Just keep monitoring once in a while & if they seem to be increasing might be time to blow out the dust.

 

2) PATA are just fine for unRAID use.  Given a choice, probably better to have a SATA parity drive.  But the "raw" speed of your average 7200 rpm PATA drive is exactly the same as your average 7200 rpm SATA drive.

[SSD]

1.  A little googling goes a long way!

    http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7677

    http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000748.html

 

2.  Depending on the motherboard, your PATA drives may or may not be on the PCI bus.  If they are, you'd likely see performance degradation when doing parity checks.  My older MB has a high speed IDE bus and they'd work fine.  Even with a newer MB with IDE on the PCI bus, I'd use them.  But if you are interested in selling them and getting SATA, send me a PM.

[Billped]

Max drive temps seem to depend on three factors:

1. Ambient temperature.  If your server is locked in a small closet on a hot day with no A/C in the house, a windtunnel wouldn't help them.

2. Space between the drives.  1/2" is far better than 1/4" which is far better than zero space.

3. Existence/lack of airflow over the drives.  Most people's systems give no airflow over the drives.  Zero.

 

I originally had a well-spaced set of drives and later added a fan that sucks in air from the front and blows it (at the lowest fan speed) over my drives and their parity-temps dropped by something like 10C.

 

Diuring parity, I tickle the low-40s on a hot day and I have no A/C (so ambient can get up to 30C).  Since I hadn't run parity since September, I ran one last week and I think the temps got no higher than the upper 30s with an ambient temp of perhaps 20C.  I figure that is pretty good.  I run Seagates.

 

 

Bill