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2 Terabytes of Storage Goodness! (New Pic w/Cooling)

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elvis:


--- Quote from: jcrouse on July 23, 2005, 11:41:08 pm ---I would have preferred aluminum but when you're using free stock from work you take what they got. :)

--- End quote ---

2 pieces of sheet metal (even some cheapy galvanised stuff) would have cost you a couple of bucks at worst.  You could have picked up building or automotive scrap for free too.

But anyways... get some good forced cooling between the drives, and all should be well.

And you'll have no problems with the smart strip.  Worst case scenario is the mobo powers up without the drives, or vice versa.  And either is not going to affect the well being of your hardware.


xonix_digital:

Its not so much that they would overheat, just get unstable and slow. Hot hard drives at any ratio are more likely to fault...

$.0000002


-=XD=-

Xiaou2:


 When HD's get hot, the metal expands.  When metal expands, the drive heads get out of alignment and can do permanent damage to the disk surface and to the read heads.

 You definitely will need at least 3/4" between them.  Id go with 1" personally.

 You will want to use metal - esp aluminum for the sides if possible.  Plastic is an awesome heat isulator.  (try wearing a 100% acrylic sweater to find out)

 You should make half of that storage, and half that backup.   Cause if any one of those drives fail.. you will most likely cry.   

 Im running 4 drives in my system.   2 for storage, 2 for backup.   Ive lost at least 4 drives in my short life with pcs.   Ive since learned the hard way... that backups are needed.  (lost all my data a few times!  ):   

 Ive learned that heat does in fact destroy them quickly.   I bought a huge tower case, spaced the drives one full drivespace appart, and put fans in front of them all to keep them very cool.    After that, Ive never had a failure anymore, and its been years.

 The other thing.. is room tempature.    On really hot days, I noticed that the drives were cooking even with the fans.  In that case, I removed the towers side door, and placed a huge 2ft box fan right next to the case.   And if that didnt work, I turned the pc off.  (but that always seemed to do the trick)

 If case of an enclosed space such as a cab, you may need to get an industrial blower fan.   They move air much quicker than typical case fans.    And or use industrial printer fans (or real arcade cab fans).  They are almost 1" in thickness,  and have heavy duty, powerfull, high  rev, ball bearing  motors in them.  They are rated to move much more air than pc case fans.

   I will stress this once more...

- Heat will Destroy HD's in a very short time period. 
- Have equal backup's to data (else you are gambling your data, and may lose
huge.  HDs have a huge failure rate.  I used to work in a pc shop, and I had like 30 bad hds a week to send back cause of failures within less than 1yr service.

 Id tried to backup with cds.. and you could try dvd.. but thats actually more costly and time consuming.  You will find out that you will forget what you have and have not backed up.. and how little you actually do back up.   And if a cd gets a scratch, you will lose that too.

 Hd's are great for backup, cause they are so fast to backup, and have such huge space capacity.   But backup you must, unless you care less about your data.

 Its almost a gaurentee that one day, your drive(s) will fail.   They are mechanical in nature, and in time parts will wear and misalign.     




elvis:

Nice fan additions.  That should see you right.

I wouldn't mind a few TB myself for general storage around the house, especially considering the volume of home movies of the kids we seem to have bulking up on hard disks spread across the house.


tivogre:

I can highly recommend the 3ware RAID controller that I use.

It takes 8 drives, up to 2 TB total storage;  RAID 5 is AWESOME.

Out of the 8 drives, you get 1.75 TB of available storage.  the other .25TB is used by the RAID algorithms. 

For that sacrifice ALL of the drives are "redundant".  Any single drive can fail in the chain, and you just keep on truckin';  it looks like one giant drive to the PC.

Power down, replace the bad drive, boot up, and the array re-builds the new drive.

I've had to do this in my array once;  it works as advertised.

I echo the comments above... you may not think so now, but it will SUCK WHEN (not if) you lose 250GB of data.

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