[mythtv-users] harddrive suggestions?

[Dane Kantner]

> I think there is a bit of misinformation going on about 7200 RPM drives in
general.  No hard drive should require cooling on its own - if you have one
that does, it's either defective or just a poor quality drive.  I have a
Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9

The Maxtors in question are the standard ones they sell at your average
retail shop (i.e.,
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1051384641363&skuId=5168855&type=product&productCategoryId=cat01043)
...  my local CompUSA has a sign next to them that says "We STRONGLY
recommend blah blah blah" ...maybe they just want to sell hard drive
coolers, but after personally seeing (and feeling) how hot they were, and
having 3 of them go out in a very short period of time (which were all
bought from different places at different times), I wouldn't A) buy one or
B) not cool it.  Two of the cases were nice $100+ Antec cases with fans out
the wazoo.  The third one was in a case that probably could've been better.

I talked to a tech at Maxtor regarding this and he admitted that they were
having a very high failure rate on them due to overheating, but Maxtor
wasn't doing much about it (other than RMAing) at the time.  That was 6
months ago, perhaps they've changed the design or perhaps not.

The IBM drives we use in some systems run almost juast as hot.  If a drive
is warm enough to not want to touch it for 20 seconds, I'd say thats an
issue.  While it may not be causing the drive to fail now or in the next 2
months, you'll probably wish you had done something about it in 3 years when
its out of warranty and it fails.

> Unless you can create a little air circuit just for the drives (say,
blowing cool air in to take the heat away from the drives, then blowing that
air directly out of the case via a duct or some other method), I don't think
hard drive fans are a very good idea.  It's better to ventilate your case
properly - better to suck the hot air out of the case rather than blowing it
*into* the case.

The hard drive cooler I recommended does blow it out of the case...the ones
that have fans on top are pretty much useless IMO.