What IS reasonable disk drive temperature?

[Jim Cornette]

Alexander Dalloz wrote:

>Am Mo, den 13.06.2005 schrieb Jim Cornette um 3:43:
>
>  
>
>>This program should be sufficient for the purpose. Is 46 Degrees C hot 
>>for a light duty installation? The drives in the environment that they 
>>are used are constanlty performing read/write operations and are powered 
>>on 24/7
>>    
>>
>
>  
>
>>Jim
>>
>>Installed: hddtemp.i386 0:0.3-0.4.beta13
>>Complete!
>>
>>hddtemp /dev/hda
>>/dev/hda: IC25N040ATCS04-0: 46°C
>>    
>>
>
>46°C is too much in my opinion. It is not that bad that you very quickly
>will have problems but the temperature will massively lower the drive's
>lifetime. I suggest you do a better cooling. Place a 80mm fan in front
>of the harddrive(s). That helps a lot. 30°C - 35°C are values which mean
>a good condition.
>
>Alexander
>
>
>  
>
These drives were very short lived and usually died out within 200 days 
for the first onset and others had a little longer lifespan near 300 
days with none making it any further without failures.
My plan is to set up two identical machines as the product usually is 
sold as and run the tests with one using the now no longer used Hitachi, 
which smokes at low levels of duty compared to the Fujitsu, which seems 
to be running reliably well over 500 days of continuous service.
One scheme that was tried was to put a fan to blow air directly at the 
hard disk. The scheme was tried on around 20 computers and the machines 
did not fails as of yet. Before this scheme, the only fans were the CPU, 
power supply fan and another case fan to cool the whole unit.
Other than the 20 test units, the remaining units have the above 
configuration.
A newer scheme uses larger drives which consume twice the power. 
(changing from 2.5" to 3.5" drives and raising the profile of the case. 
No additional fans added)
I didn't think the changing of drives to 3.5", though larger platters 
would have more surface area to throw out the heat,  would be a better 
alternative over a better and a cooler running 2.5" drive.
Adding an additional fan and better cabling seemed to be a better route 
to take, along with good drives used in the first place. 
Some "frankencables" were used in these units also. (40-pin IDE cables 
with 2.5" to 3.5" adapters used). With the 20 test units, the 
"frankencables" were replaced with 40-pin to 44-pin cables. I believe 
the better cabling was more responsible for the 20 units not making any 
repair visits, but the extra cooling and switching of vendors for the 
hard drives all happened within th same timeframe.
I have one of the converted units that I kept. Running this unit against 
the standard build unit and also testing the 3.5" converted units might 
be interesting.
So the test can be ran with similar stress fo each unit, what might be  
good program to run in these units for a moderate to heavy constant load 
to be delivered to each test computer?

Jim