Buying CDs. Why?

[johnb]

There has been a lot of discussion here, I think initiated by myself, about hard drives failing. Does anyone know if the hard drives that come with dedicated music servers are more reliable?

I suspect not.

You must have been particularly unfortunate to have had a drive fail after 6 weeks. It might well have been due to it mishandling during shipment or due to a manufacturing flaw in either the HDD or the LaCie enclosure.

HDDs are usually very reliable. I have only had one fail on me in over ten years and that was a WD MyBook external drive. I later discovered that the actual HDD was fine but the electronics in the "MyBook" enclosure had fried. The main problem with external HDDs is overheating due to poor heat dissipation. The HDD from the failed "MyBook" had reached a maximum temperature of 46C - not good (the max temp is recorded within the drive in its S.M.A.R.T. data).

I am sure that external HDD manufacturers have taken steps to reduce the likelihood if overheating since my MyBook failure (probably in part by using "green" low power HDDs). However I would guess that heat dissipation will remain a problem for passively cooled external drives.

These days I choose enclosures and the HDDs to go into them (low power "green" HDDs) separately and I always stand the HDDs vertically to assist with cooling. As I use HP Microserver as a glorified NAS I only use the external HDDs for backup purposes.

A useful utility for Windows (which I have used for some years) is "Hard Disk Sentinel" which monitors the temperatures and SMART statistics of all HDDs connected to your PC, including external HDDs (though some external HDDs might have incompatible enclosures). Anyway, it is available for a trial download.

[cloughie]

I suspect not.

You must have been particularly unfortunate to have had a drive fail after 6 weeks. It might well have been due to it mishandling during shipment or due to a manufacturing flaw in either the HDD or the LaCie enclosure.

HDDs are usually very reliable. I have only had one fail on me in over ten years and that was a WD MyBook external drive. I later discovered that the actual HDD was fine but the electronics in the "MyBook" enclosure had fried. The main problem with external HDDs is overheating due to poor heat dissipation. The HDD from the failed "MyBook" had reached a maximum temperature of 46C - not good (the max temp is recorded within the drive in its S.M.A.R.T. data).

I am sure that external HDD manufacturers have taken steps to reduce the likelihood if overheating since my MyBook failure (probably in part by using "green" low power HDDs). However I would guess that heat dissipation will remain a problem for passively cooled external drives.

These days I choose enclosures and the HDDs to go into them (low power "green" HDDs) separately and I always stand the HDDs vertically to assist with cooling. As I use HP Microserver as a glorified NAS I only use the external HDDs for backup purposes.

A useful utility for Windows (which I have used for some years) is "Hard Disk Sentinel" which monitors the temperatures and SMART statistics of all HDDs connected to your PC, including external HDDs (though some external HDDs might have incompatible enclosures). Anyway, it is available for a trial download.

I have had 2 failed. I suspect overheating - I now do not leave external HDDs plugged in.

[richardfinegold]

I have had 2 failed. I suspect overheating - I now do not leave external HDDs plugged in.

That seems sensible. I have had 2 fail in business applications, and now this one

[David-G]

A useful utility for Windows (which I have used for some years) is "Hard Disk Sentinel" which monitors the temperatures and SMART statistics of all HDDs connected to your PC, including external HDDs (though some external HDDs might have incompatible enclosures). Anyway, it is available for a trial download.

Does that mean that all hard drives have built in thermometers?

[johnb]

Does that mean that all hard drives have built in thermometers?

Yes - though not the glass and mercury kind.

All HDDs have temperature sensors which can be read by appropriate utilities. They also usually self-record the highest and sometimes the lowest ever temperature during the HDDs lifetime.

In fact there is a whole raft of data that HDDs self monitor and record, it is known as S.M.A.R.T. Most PCs will check the SMART data when they start up and report any critical problems but there are also utilities (such as Hard Disk Sentinel) which will monitor the HDDs data and check for changes which might indicate problems that are developing. Additionally Hard Disk Sentinel, for one, also displays the current HDD temperature(s) on the Windows Taskbar. This is especially useful for passively cooled external HDDs - where overheating is the biggest cause of failure.

[David-G]

Yes - though not the glass and mercury kind.

All HDDs have temperature sensors which can be read by appropriate utilities. They also usually record the highest and lowest ever temperature during the HDDs lifetime.

In fact there is a whole raft of data that HDDs self monitor and record, it is known as S.M.A.R.T. Most PCs will check the SMART data when they start up and report any critical problems but there are also utilities (such as Hard Disk Sentinel) which will monitor the HDDs data and check for changes which might indicate problems that are developing. Hard Disk Sentinel, for one, also displays the current HDD temperature(s) on the Windows Taskbar.

Thanks johnb, that is most interesting, and evidently important. I had no idea of this at all. (I did not imagine that the thermometer would be glass and mercury!)