[G5] Drives????

[Zane H. Healy]

At 12:04 AM -0500 7/27/05, Pat wrote:
>On Jul 26, 2005, at 11:43 PM, Zane H. Healy wrote:
>>Drives from any manufacturer at some time or another have bad 
>>failure rates.  Among the most infamous are the IBM Deskstars (aka 
>>Deathstars).  Western Digital had basically the exact same problem 
>>a couple years ago with their drives.
>>
>>Cooling also plays a *huge* factor in drive lifespans, most of mine 
>>that have died, I attribute to poor cooling.  The one that I lost 
>>in my old G4/450AGP was due to my "cooking" the controller board 
>>with another drive.
>>
>>Then again sometimes you just have bad luck.  I attribute the death 
>>of my 2 month old 300GB Seagate drive that I bought as a new system 
>>disk for my G5 2x2, as bad luck.  In fact I now suspect that it was 
>>bad when I bought it, which brings up another interesting point, 
>>I'd now recommend against doing quick formats, as they don't 
>>properly test the drive, sure it takes a lot longer to write a "1" 
>>out to each bit, but the drive will be safer to use.
>>
>>At work we deal with *LARGE* file servers, and when our computer 
>>room looses power, or we have to power them down, we know a few 
>>won't power up.  They're to used to be running, and hot, so when 
>>they cool down some die.
>>
>>Something I do to try to increase the lifespan of my drives is I 
>>don't let the computers spin them down to save power.

>I'm sorry, but I need plain English on this helpful note...like what 
>is "Cooling" and what is 'hot'?  I'm lost...do you mean you don't 
>put them to sleep?
>
>Pat

By "cooling", I mean HD's should be kept as cool as possible.  One of 
the few systems I've seen outside of high-end JBOD[1] boxes that have 
good cooling would be the G5 towers.  As a result, for the typical 
system it helps if you don't run it in to hot of a room (not always 
easy).

By "hot" I mean just that, HD's get hot, in fact besides the CPU, and 
Graphics card they're the main producers of heat in a computer.  Just 
how hot a drive gets depends on the model, and the rotational speed 
of the drive (the more RPM's the hotter the drive typically).

I put my Mac to sleep, largely to reduce the amount of heat in the 
room, but while it's awake I don't allow the drives to be powered 
down (standard energy savings step), as I don't think it is good for 
the drives.

Hopefully that's a bit more clearer, unfortunately I'm not that great 
at plain English.

			Zane

[1] I can never remember what JBOD stands for, it's an external HD 
box, typically with fans that pull air from the front over the HD's. 
The disks themselves are in canisters, that can easily be removed 
from the box.  They're often rack mounted.

-- 
--
| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
|                                  | Classic Computer Collector |
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