BTW, if the HDDs are that old and running that hot NOW is the time to backup all the data on them and replace them.
-4wd
Isn't having a hot hard drive causing data loss kind of a misnomer?
-Deozaan
If the drives are running so hot that they are "burning" hot then most likely the spindle lubricant has failed, eg. it's partially solidified. I've had this happen with a drive from 2001 that hadn't been spun up for a while.
If the drive is hot because of poor air flow then it won't be "burning" hot, it will be uncomfortably hot but you can still rest your hand on it for a rather long period of time.
As Deo said, cut the case away behind the fan, 50% of the air flow is being blocked - however, I'd still have it set to blow over the HDDs since you know where the air is going and you are using cooler outside air to do the cooling.
I read somewhere that Google did a test on their zillions of hard drives and found that the drives that were running on the cool side were more likely to fail than the drives running hot.
-Deozaan
Massive Google hard drive survey turns up very interesting thingsWhen your server farm is in the hundreds of thousands and you're using cheap, off-the-shelf hard drives as your primary means of storage, you've probably got a a pretty damned good data set for looking at the health and failure patterns of hard drives. Google studied a hundred thousand SATA and PATA drives with between 80 and 400GB storage and 5400 to 7200rpm, and while unfortunately they didn't call out specific brands or models that had high failure rates, they did find a few interesting patterns in failing hard drives. One of those we thought was most intriguing was that drives often needed replacement for issues that SMART drive status polling didn't or couldn't determine, and 56% of failed drives did not raise any significant SMART flags (and that's interesting, of course, because SMART exists solely to survey hard drive health); other notable patterns showed that failure rates are indeed definitely correlated to drive manufacturer, model, and age; failure rates did not correspond to drive usage except in very young and old drives (i.e. heavy data "grinding" is not a significant factor in failure); and there is less correlation between drive temperature and failure rates than might have been expected, and drives that are cooled excessively actually fail more often than those running a little hot. Normally we'd recommend you go on ahead and read the document, but be ready for a seriously academic and scientific analysis.
I would think that when they say "a little hot" they don't mean "burning hot".
BTW, Maxtor earned a rather good name for themselves in the 80's & 90's.....alas, that didn't carry through to the
2000's
Personally, I've never used a Maxtor since the rather expensive DiamondMax 10 I bought ran at a temperature of 70+C and failed to work.
EDIT: You should also cut out the pressed metal grill that the rear fan uses as it's wasting it's time sitting there spinning with that amount of metal in front of it. If you must have a grill, (to save the cat's tail), then use a wire grill like you used to find on decent PSU's, like this
one.
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