Overheating Hard drives

[1stRaven]

Have a slight issue and not exactly sure what caused it.

After starting my machine up on Monday night, I got the dreaded rattling noises. Hard drive failure. Ok, no bigger - they do fail and I have internal backup drives for that reason. On closer investigation, 2 of my 7 drives had failed - 1 of the 500gb drives in my raid array and 1 of my 1tb backup drives.

I've now ordered up some new drives, included a further one and recreated the raid array etc. My concern is that I was lucky that the backup drive that failed was not the one backing up the data on the raid array so I didn't lose any data - I may not be this lucky next time. As far as I can tell, my drives shouldn't be overheating - 6 of my drives are air cooled by fans and the other two are smaller drives which don't have too much activity. The case is an antec 900 so airflow is pretty decent.

Below is a pic of my now new setup with all 8 drives fitted.


Any one have any ideas on why two drives, in two different drive cages, would fail at the same time?

[kalniel]

Were they bought at the same time? They might have suffered some trauma in or prior to shipping which led to a similar end of life period.

[1stRaven]

Were they bought at the same time? They might have suffered some trauma in or prior to shipping which led to a similar end of life period.

Yes, they were. Good point. Although so was another drive in my raid array. Time to keep an eye on that. They have lasted 13 months if they were damaged in shipping.

[watercooled]

If you think they might be overheating you could check the SMART temperature with HD Tune or something but the case should provide ample cooling for them.

[ehhhhhhh]

If you come to the conclusion that the heat is an issue then tidying up your cables could help
(and installing some fans to suck the air in from the front)

btw, what is the brand of the failed drives?

[1stRaven]

I'll check out the temps shortly. Haven't looked into an app for that.

There are two fans built into the case that blow air over the bottom 6 drives.

As for the tidying the cables, that was the best I can do at the time. I need to get some cable ties sorted. Its a shame the case doesn't have better cut outs for the sata cables. The power cables don't have any spare length on them to direct them anywhere else.

Drive wise, 1 was seagate and 1 was a western digital.

[shbris]

i have that case. what temps do your drives say? mine are (recorded during recent mini heatwave for perspective):
2.5 laptop drive: 30'
caviar blue: 32'
caviar green: 26'

so pretty chilly (boot is caviar blue hence highest, pretty impressed with 26' of the green), thanks to the fans at the front, have you got them on? i have mine at lowest but still loads of cooling

also, hard drives fail, statistically there's always a chance of two failing. caution is obviously necessary but you might just be unlucky.

+ for a bit of cable tidying as well though

[1stRaven]

i have that case. what temps do your drives say? mine are (recorded during recent mini heatwave for perspective):
2.5 laptop drive: 30'
caviar blue: 32'
caviar green: 26'

so pretty chilly (boot is caviar blue hence highest, pretty impressed with 26' of the green), thanks to the fans at the front, have you got them on? i have mine at lowest but still loads of cooling

also, hard drives fail, statistically there's always a chance of two failing. caution is obviously necessary but you might just be unlucky.

+ for a bit of cable tidying as well though

The raid array isn't reporting the temps of the its 4 drives which isn't really surprising.

The others are

Hitachi 2tb - 26'C
Seagate 1tb - 23'C
Western Digital 400gb -32'C
Western Digital 500Gb - 31'C

The two WD drives are not cooled as they are sat in the 5.25 bays in mount adapters. Temps are as of tonight. Room temp is around 21'C

The fans are on and set to the low setting. I was going to go to medium but the noise level was getting a little too high.

Cabling wise - I need to find a solution but rather not cut the case if I can help it. Theres quite a number of cables in there as well.

[Jasp]

Looks fine to me, my WD250s have sat at 36c and 39c for the last two years and it has not done them any harm lol.

[smargh]

As said previously: same batch of hard drives.

Also, new suggestion: faulty power supply. My previous Tagan PSU killed a couple of drives in its death throes.

[Singh400]

The temps are fine. Your drives aren't overheating. Something else is causing the issue. Either bad batch or dodgy PSU?

[12GaugeShotty]

It's the ribbon cable. It's severely impeding air flow in your case. /sarcasm

[1stRaven]

It's the ribbon cable. It's severely impeding air flow in your case. /sarcasm

yeah, damm that ribbon cable! lol

That was an optical drive I had spare and I've ran out of sata ports on the p5q board.