Hard Drive - Max. Temperature And Warranty Question

[Thanh-BKK]

Hello.

Yesterday i lost my third hard drive since moving to Thailand at the end of 2000, this one was an 80 GB Western Digital, purchased only April last year. It had (still has in fact) Ubuntu 8.04 installed on it and as of yesterday morning is at times not even detected by the BIOS any longer and if it IS detected the OS does not boot, gets stuck on the forced disk check and, if using a live-CD OS and running disk check or similar programs it generates a ton of I/O errors and "failed to read/write block xxxx" type of errors.

This must be an hardware issue because it happens during normal use, no installation or update was going on that would have written to (and corrupted) a partition, i noticed the problem first when Firefox upon start behaved like some add-ons where freshly installed and upon configuring them it crashed (Firefox, that is). I then shut down Linux and the immediate reboot failed with the above problems.

Now i have a good idea why that drive failed. I have temperature sensors attached to my CPU and the system HDD with an LCD display on the front of my computer where i can see the temperatures. My computer is a regular midi-sized tower, there are two HDD's and two DVD-burners in it and a rather large CPU cooler (Arctic Freezer Pro 64) so the case is quite crammed. The computer runs all day long, my room is on the sixth (top) floor of the building and gets pretty hot during the day, 35 degrees up.

Now the HDD in my computer heats up to 42-45 degrees all the time, which is actually hotter than the CPU (that Arctic cooler is quite good, keeping it at 38-40 degrees even under load) so i guess my HDD has gone up in smoke because it overheated repectively was running too hot for too long.

Now what can i do to get my HDD's cooler? They are mounted in the bottom front of the case, in the 3.5" bays, the first one in the 2nd spot from bottom and the second in 4th spot (one empty spot between them). There is an air inlet in the front and i have placed a large-ish fan there to blow over those HDD's (without that fan they run well over 50 degrees) and there is nothing more i can do, fan-wise.

Does it have an effect if i use a larger case, such as a bigtower? But then where to put such a monster. What else could i do..?

Another question. The HDD that just died is only about 1 1/2 years old, according to the sticker on it it is under warranty until April 2013. That sticker is from Synnex. But i don't have the purchase receipt anymore. Will i still get the warranty? Where do i need to go, back to the shop where i bought it or straight to Synnex?

I have build a LOT of computers but for some reason my own is the only one of those that is permanently struggling with such heat issues. But then it is probably the only one of them that is running all the time in very high ambient temperatures........

Kind regards.......

Thanh

[thaimite]

Hello.

Yesterday i lost my third hard drive since moving to Thailand at the end of 2000, this one was an 80 GB Western Digital, purchased only April last year. It had (still has in fact) Ubuntu 8.04 installed on it and as of yesterday morning is at times not even detected by the BIOS any longer and if it IS detected the OS does not boot, gets stuck on the forced disk check and, if using a live-CD OS and running disk check or similar programs it generates a ton of I/O errors and "failed to read/write block xxxx" type of errors.

This must be an hardware issue because it happens during normal use, no installation or update was going on that would have written to (and corrupted) a partition, i noticed the problem first when Firefox upon start behaved like some add-ons where freshly installed and upon configuring them it crashed (Firefox, that is). I then shut down Linux and the immediate reboot failed with the above problems.

Now i have a good idea why that drive failed. I have temperature sensors attached to my CPU and the system HDD with an LCD display on the front of my computer where i can see the temperatures. My computer is a regular midi-sized tower, there are two HDD's and two DVD-burners in it and a rather large CPU cooler (Arctic Freezer Pro 64) so the case is quite crammed. The computer runs all day long, my room is on the sixth (top) floor of the building and gets pretty hot during the day, 35 degrees up.

Now the HDD in my computer heats up to 42-45 degrees all the time, which is actually hotter than the CPU (that Arctic cooler is quite good, keeping it at 38-40 degrees even under load) so i guess my HDD has gone up in smoke because it overheated repectively was running too hot for too long.

Now what can i do to get my HDD's cooler? They are mounted in the bottom front of the case, in the 3.5" bays, the first one in the 2nd spot from bottom and the second in 4th spot (one empty spot between them). There is an air inlet in the front and i have placed a large-ish fan there to blow over those HDD's (without that fan they run well over 50 degrees) and there is nothing more i can do, fan-wise.

Does it have an effect if i use a larger case, such as a bigtower? But then where to put such a monster. What else could i do..?

Another question. The HDD that just died is only about 1 1/2 years old, according to the sticker on it it is under warranty until April 2013. That sticker is from Synnex. But i don't have the purchase receipt anymore. Will i still get the warranty? Where do i need to go, back to the shop where i bought it or straight to Synnex?

I have build a LOT of computers but for some reason my own is the only one of those that is permanently struggling with such heat issues. But then it is probably the only one of them that is running all the time in very high ambient temperatures........

Kind regards.......

Thanh

A larger case will help, as will multiple fans to pull air in the bottom of the case and extract air out of the top. Make sure the fans work together to circulate the air. (One pulling air in and 1 pushing air out)

Many people recommend the round hard disk cables rather than the flat ribbon type because they let air circulate inside the case more freely.

Other things you could try is to use a heat sink and thermal paste to ensure the heat in the drives is conducted away from them so some big heat sink (like the case).

The closer the hard drive temperature gets to the ambient room temperature the harder it will be to cool them, so possibly a large room fan cooling the case would probably help, but it is expensive to keep a fan on 24/7 just for this purpose.

Finally have a look at this site for other ideas

Replacing the hard drive I suggest you look to the manufacturers web site for a returns policy. I had the same issue with an IBM hard drive some time ago. It was made in Thailand but bought in Hk and failed after a few montns IBM Thailand refused to honor the warrenty unless I took the drive back to the shop in HK where it was purchased. It lay in a draw for a further year until an IT friend then pointed me to a Singapore web site for Hitachi who had by that time bought over the IBM disk anufacturing. After contacting them with the drive details, I posted the faulty rive to Singapore and received a new one a few weeks later no questions asked. even though by that time I had no receipts and could not even remember where the drive was purchased. The drive serial numbers were sufficient to prove its age. After this event I no longer buy any IBM product.

I often wonder why nobody makes a refrigerated computer case to solve all issues.

Maybe you should buy a mini fridge and assemble you computer inside that

edit

I forgot to say make sure the case is in a location with plenty of room for air to circulate

Edited August 27, 2009 by thaimite

[spacemunk]

WD drives has 5 yrs warranty by Synnex

just sent my WD drive to Synnex at Fortune yesterday. it died after a week.

What u could do is get a drivebay cooler like the 1 from Coolermaster

-Convert the three 5.25" drive bays into a four 3.5” HDD module with 12cm sleeve bearing cooling fan

-Compatible with ATX case with three 5.25" drive bays

Or you could also buy some fast and use cable ties to tie the fans to the unused bays

HDD's suppose tp run below 38deg

Edited August 27, 2009 by spacemunk

[d0ndela]

Another question. The HDD that just died is only about 1 1/2 years old, according to the sticker on it it is under warranty until April 2013. That sticker is from Synnex. But i don't have the purchase receipt anymore. Will i still get the warranty? Where do i need to go, back to the shop where i bought it or straight to Synnex?

You do not need the receipt and you do not need to go through the shop where you bought it. If you go through that shop you just risk that they charge you for their "help".

We (the shop I'm at) send parts to Synnex all the time and we never had problems with not having the receipt. I'm under the impression that receipts in Thailand are pretty much only used for VAT returns, no one cares if they get the receipt when they buy something or not, especially not the local people. And I think that is why Synnex is so thorough with putting guarantee stickers on all the products they ship out, with dates and everything.

So if you live in the proximity of a Synnex service center (which I guess you do in BKK), I would suggest you to go directly to them and show them the warranty sticker.

See a list of Synnex service centers here

[Phil Conners]

WD drives has 5 yrs warranty by Synnex

just sent my WD drive to Synnex at Fortune yesterday. it died after a week.

What u could do is get a drivebay cooler like the 1 from Coolermaster

-Convert the three 5.25" drive bays into a four 3.5” HDD module with 12cm sleeve bearing cooling fan

-Compatible with ATX case with three 5.25" drive bays

Or you could also buy some fast and use cable ties to tie the fans to the unused bays

HDD's suppose tp run below 38deg

Interesting ... Is it noisy and how much ~ does it cost?

My disk drives usually start to crap out after about 1.5-2 years, then I get a replacement on warranty. Presume the heat in Thailand is too much for it.

Edited August 27, 2009 by Phil Conners

[delboy]

Seagate HDDs are designed to operate in a range 5-50 degrees with newer models having an upper limit of 60 degrees.

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/self...&NewLang=en

I've been using my current HDD for 4 years now, PC on usually 24/7, and HDD temperature usually in the range 45-49 degrees. I have a small desk fan that constantly blasts into the holes in the casing to supplement the internal fan.

Unfortunately, we must expect failure from our HDDs usually at boot-up time, so regular back-ups to other HDDs or discs are essential

[Tywais]

An interesting article > Experts: No cure in sight for unpredictable hard drive loss

[Phil Conners]

^ Interesting indeed, good find, thanks!

[Phil Conners]

WD drives has 5 yrs warranty by Synnex

just sent my WD drive to Synnex at Fortune yesterday. it died after a week.

What u could do is get a drivebay cooler like the 1 from Coolermaster

-Convert the three 5.25" drive bays into a four 3.5” HDD module with 12cm sleeve bearing cooling fan

-Compatible with ATX case with three 5.25" drive bays

Or you could also buy some fast and use cable ties to tie the fans to the unused bays

HDD's suppose tp run below 38deg

Interesting ... Is it noisy and how much ~ does it cost?

My disk drives usually start to crap out after about 1.5-2 years, then I get a replacement on warranty. Presume the heat in Thailand is too much for it.

Ok found it here - http://www.svc.com/stb-3t4-e3-gp.html. "One 120x120x25 mm Blue LED fan, 1200 rpm, 22 dBA" - quiet but I already use one of these fans in front of my disks and they are still running WAY hot. Not going to make it in Thailand I'm afraid.

I think something like this -http://www.colordrives.com/nighthawk-hard-disk-drive-cooler-ec-hd-f117-evercool.html - would be needed to make any difference here. May be a little noisy though. Will see if I can find something like this in Tukcom.

[Thanh-BKK]

Hi.

The problem that i have is that i got no space for a large case.... i have been looking at some but these big-tower ones are truly huge...... and that bay cooler is also interesting BUT i don't have three bays free, indeed i've got zero free....... my case has 4, there are two DVD-burners, the panel with the LCD and a grille (fan behind) to let air in. So that is a no-go......

However"heat sink" sounds like an idea.... do they have them for hard drives? If i knew where to get them i'd stick some Peltier-Elements on the drives, i wouldn't mind the extra power they use..... but i have never seen them anywhere.

I don't like Seagate because a Seagate was my 2nd drive to die in Thailand, after only four weeks of use (!) and to get it through warranty was a nightmare with both the shop as well as the service guy (Seagate service in Panthip) insisting that i had dropped it because there was a scratch on one side from normal mounting in a 3.5" bay. A$$holes. Also we had plenty of dead Seagates in a series of Compaq machines that were bought in bulk (28 at once), of those about 10 hard drives failed within a year (2nd hand computers with one month warranty).

Kind regards......

Thanh

[Tatsujin]

Hard drives dying here seem to be a fairly regular occurrence regardless of the manufacturer. I think on my HP desktop, I am on my 4th drive in less than 2 years! I haven't found a decent solution to this other than to by 2 x drives and constantly have 1 backup/mirror to the other as a safety measure which gets expensive quick.

I would think a 'separate' tower with it's own internal cooling specifically for hard drives would be the best bet but with the ambient temp here in Thailand, very often all we are doing is blowing hot air over already hot drives (not to mention all the dust that is often in the air). If anyone comes across a tower for HD's that has water cooling/chilling etc I'd definitely be interested in something like that but so far I've not found anything.

Chris

[Thanh-BKK]

Hi.

You are right with the "blowing hot air over already hot drives", as i mentioned - the air temperature in my room during daytime easily exceeds 35 degrees Celsius so i believe that running the HDD's at below 50 is actually not even bad, in terms of "cooling". Still bad for the HDD's though.

I would never have expected this 80 GB one to die, after all it is the system drive - once Linux is loaded that drive is pretty much left alone. The SECOND drive however, which is a 500 GB (also Western Digital) which holds all the data, is under heavy load - Bit Torrent all day long. Which is the reason why i have a "twin" to that one - an identical drive in an external USB-enclosure and weekly backups of the torrent partition, important files to be saved are being saved to both at the same time (and the external remains disconnected if not in use).

So i did not have a backup of the system drive - oh well, the joy of re-installing a full-blown (excuse the pun) Linux system with a shipload of applications including all their settings.... well i'm on a newer Ubuntu version now which actually DOES perform quite a few notches better, it boots fully in like 25 seconds (from power-on, that is including POST) and shuts down clean in 8 seconds.... by now i have pretty much all apps re-installed and configured and am "good to go" again, next step is to buy not one but two identical HDD's and clone the now-installed system to them - one to be used (as the currently used drive is quite old already, although never been used much) and one as a backup. Might as well go all-SATA when i'm at it, maybe that gives the performance an extra boost (and removes the IDE ribbon for better cooling too!)

The problem with a separate tower for the HDD's (which i wouldn't mind the least bit, i could easily accomodate a second midi-tower beside mine, however can't put a taller one such as a big-tower) is the "how to hook them up to the mainboard". I personally haven't seen IDE or SATA cables that are about a meter long or even more. USB? Then the second tower would need a controller and a PSU..... and if that would perform like IDE or SATA..??

Best regards.....

Thanh

[niller74]

As other people said, buying a bigger case is a good idea, but if you still wish to monitor your hard disks more closely in the future and I see you are running Linux, then have a look at one of these two programs.

Smartmontools

Very sophisticated monitoring tool.

apt-get install smartmontools

or a simpler

HDDTemp

Extract the temperature from your harddrive. It can be written to the syslog so you can back trace the temperature.

apt-get install hddtemp

[d0ndela]

The problem with a separate tower for the HDD's (which i wouldn't mind the least bit, i could easily accomodate a second midi-tower beside mine, however can't put a taller one such as a big-tower) is the "how to hook them up to the mainboard". I personally haven't seen IDE or SATA cables that are about a meter long or even more. USB? Then the second tower would need a controller and a PSU..... and if that would perform like IDE or SATA..??

It should be possible to find long SATA cables around, a quick google search found this site. So it seems that they are available if only you can find someone who sell them

If you can make it work with eSata then it's easy to find longer cables, 1.8m cables are available in Thailand.

Edited August 28, 2009 by d0ndela

[Carmine6]

... They are mounted in the bottom front of the case, in the 3.5" bays, the first one in the 2nd spot from bottom and the second in 4th spot (one empty spot between them). ...

If you have a spot (bay?) in between, there are combo heat sink/fans like the attached picture. They attach to the bottom of a drive. The drive I have mine attached to is 9 or 10 degrees celcius less than another drive in the same case.

This is a Vantec in the picture, but there are other brands. Not sure what's available in Thailand.

[higgy88]

Knock on wood, I have never had a hard drive failure here in Thailand, although I do have backups of everything if/when I do.

The first computer I bought here in Thailand was well over 10 years ago. It's a Compaq with a 3.2 GB hard drive (no idea what brand) and it was still working with the original HD when I shut it off and put it in storage a year ago.

My next computer is a HP with a 80 GB Western Digital hard drive, which I bought about 5 years ago, and it also still has the original HD and is still being used. The first couple of years I used it, I never even thought of what the temps were. Then a friend suggested that I do, and suggested a free program to monitor it. It showed the HD temp to be running between 50 and 55 C. I did some research and the specs on the HD showed the upper limit to be 60. I still thought it was a little hot so added another fan. This cooled it down about 5 degrees, so for the last 3 years it's been running between 45 and 50. Never had a problem.

My third computer I bought a year ago and finally retired the Compaq. is also a HP, dual core AMD with a 160 GB WD hard drive. I immediately added another fan and this one runs between 40 and 45.

The one thing I do not do is leave my computers on all the time. When I go to sleep everything is shut down, and then started up the next day when I get up. I don't do torrents, but watch/listen to a lot of streaming video/audio along with the usual web surfing, email, etc. The biggest workout the computers get is in the evenings/weekends when my kids are home from school and they each park themselves in front of the computers and play their online games.

I do not have a/c in my house, but have fans blowing the air around. I don't have a thermometer but would guess the inside temps to be around 30 or maybe a little hotter during the afternoons.

All I am trying to suggest here is that maybe it isn't just the heat that's your problem.

[Phil Conners]

This is a Vantec in the picture, but there are other brands. Not sure what's available in Thailand.

Found something like that in Tukcom @ 100 baht each. Will be interesting to see if that does anything to the avg life of my disks.

Edited August 28, 2009 by Phil Conners

[NUMBNUTTS]

I would try and resuscitate the drive - I have more file system disks than OS and I have a lot of those.

Clearly a new boot drive is in order to get ya up and running, but I must query why the HDD let go - it might - usually is a catastrophic series of silly events

I believe in reformatting any drive several times - overnite on larger drives - this 10 second samba is nonsense under heavy lifting conditions.

BTW Simply adding more heatsink etc is a fallacy - like adding more oil to the sump to lower the oil temp - it merely takes longer to boil - I havent used a PC in a while,

and NB are more difficult to cool, but I used to clean, clean, clean judiciously, take off one side and turn a desk fan on the both of us. Kept mine alive.

Leave the fan on at nite, if the net is on, otherwise dis the net and let them all sleep - I guess its greener to turn it all off.

I have had several IBM Travelstars & Toshiba 2.5 let go, but always managed to resuscitate them - now used for data storage only - offline

Use both M$ & Unix file tools - each several times - including chkdsk & bad blocs checks.

[Crushdepth]

Suggest you buy a cheap external NAS box and put your hard drives in that. They'll be out of your computer case and come with their own fan, run much cooler. D-link starts from 6,000 baht for 2 drive model and you can run it in raid if you want. Comes with gigabit ethernet port. And you don't need to crawl around ripping cables out to get to things.

[Phil Conners]

What's a good Windows utility to check the temperature of the disk drives? Preferably just a simple tool showing the temp for each drive. If necessary nag or trial ware but preferably free.

Edited August 28, 2009 by Phil Conners

[Tywais]

What's a good Windows utility to check the temperature of the disk drives? Preferably just a simple tool showing the temp for each drive. If necessary nag or trial ware but preferably free.

I use SpeedFan and Everest is also good.

//edit - both are free.

[Phil Conners]

Thanks Tywais.

Adding this simple 100 baht cooler fan to each drive has lowered temperatures from 65C to 45C. (According to SpeedFan; from ~145F to ~110F). Well worth the investment methinks

Edited August 28, 2009 by Phil Conners

[Thanh-BKK]

As other people said, buying a bigger case is a good idea, but if you still wish to monitor your hard disks more closely in the future and I see you are running Linux, then have a look at one of these two programs.

Smartmontools

Very sophisticated monitoring tool.

apt-get install smartmontools

or a simpler

HDDTemp

Extract the temperature from your harddrive. It can be written to the syslog so you can back trace the temperature.

apt-get install hddtemp

Hi.

I tried the first one - smartmontools, after i figured out (with some googling) how to use it (i am a mouse pusher..... and that proggie is CLI-only!) i was not really surprised when it yielded nothing but an error message - wrong SMART hashsum or some such. I tried that several times with several options and always got that same result. So either this HDD is already dead as well (but it appears to be working just fine!) or the program doesn't work with Ubuntu 9.04 or it simply doesn't like me. Oh, and it insisted on installing "postfix" along with it which i allowed - only to find that both of them (smartmontools and postfix) placed themselves in autostart and i do NOT want them THERE. The more things run themselves, the more stress on the HDD! I also disabled (and had disabled on the now-dead drive) indexing as i don't need to search for files - i know where i keep my stuff.

By the way - yes i am running Linux and very happily so but i am in no way, shape or form a geek. I am not scared of the command line, yet i do prefer things that can be clicked with a mouse

@Carmine6

Believe it or not i spent half the day today to search for those precise things On E-Bay that is. But the GOOD ones are of course of the type "sorry we don't ship to Thailand" (Thermaltake!) and those cheap ones one can get for 150 Baht in Panthip.... i've had plenty of fans like that, they last a couple of months and then start making noises or simply stop running. I don't want to take my HDD's out all the time to change fans, i like a computer to simply work, opening it every half year to blow the dust out is sufficient. I will nevertheless have a look at Panthip, maybe they have the Thermaltake ones, too, and while i'm there also get a ball-bearing high-rpm fan to replace the one that's now sitting in front of the HDD's. I on't mind some noise as long as it keeps things cool.

@Higgy88

Very similar situation here. My computer is off during the night as neither me nor my boyfriend can sleep with it humming away (that LCD temperature display in the front plus the christmas tree of LED's on router, UPS and PC are also bright enough to prevent sleep) but apart from that it is running all day long, mainly for Bit Torrent. In the morning i usually do heavier work like video transcoding and editing and in the evening some web surfing and that's it. The HDD that is under permanent stress is that 500 GB one and that is way older than the one that just died.... maybe i just have a Monday's product there.

Oh and in this particular computer it is the first drive to die on me. The first was a 15 GB Maxtor that was in my computer when i came here from Germany - that was a desktop case crammed full and it's only (!) was the one in the PSU. That HDD overheated, too. It's "temporary replacement", thought to keep me running until i got my Maxtor back from warranty (had to send to Singapore) was a 4.3 GB Seagate - which lasted a full four WEEKS before it, too, died from the heat in that desktop case. Only then i realized that heat IS an issue here and that a HDD which you can't touch because it's so hot won't live long (but the Maxtor lasted about four-five months). Now this WD..... but i had plenty of dead drives, almost all Seagate, in computers in an office i used to work and be responsible for those computers. All those had been replaced with Hitachi drives if i remember correctly and as far as i know those computers still work today.

@NUMBNUTTS

I will certainly hook up this drive again, i have put it in an external enclosure now and will see if there is any chance to get some more data off it, specifically my Google Earth configs.... all those placemarks! Pretty much everything else is already re-installed and configured (surprised myself how quick i had that system back where it was before, even doing everything from scratch) and i might also try to hook it up to a Windows machine (my boyfriend still has Windows on his laptop, mine are both on Linux).

@Crushdepth

Well 6,000 Baht is not what i would call "cheap". And can one boot from those boxes? I mean if it is connected via LAN.....

Kind regards......

Thanh

[Tatsujin]

Having done some Googling, it does seem that HD's fail more often now than they used to. By that I mean, I've using a variety of Mac's and PC's for nearly 20 years and I don't recall ever having a HD drive fail on me until moving over to Thailand. The first one to go was the HD in my Compaq laptop and since then I bought a HP Pavilion Elite Desktop which seems to have problems regularly. I wonder if it is simply heat / humidity /dust that is causing the problems?

I was interested to read about people buying larger cases etc. How much (roughly) does it cost to take the internals out of my Elite m9180d and transfer them over to a larger case with additional HD bays and extra cooling for example? Anyone have any guesstimates?

Also, this external 'box' that was mentioned . . . what cabling does it have and can it be used to boot from also?

Chris

P.S. . . . when it comes to temps, 1 x 300GB internal drive is running at 39C, 1 x 1.5TB internal drive is running at 46C, 1 x 1.5TB External Drive (in case with additional cooling fan) is running at 40C and a final 1 x 1.5TB external drive (in case with NO cooling fan) is running at 49C. These are the 'average' temps I get when the system is running in a room without any additional A/C cooling in the room. When the A/C is on, those temps can come down by about 5C roughly. I can't believe that anyone's drives are running at less than 35C here in Thailand especially without any additional A/C cooling.

[Crushdepth]

I don't know to be honest. Probably not without some fiddling around, and it may depend on what model you buy and what hardware you have (need fast connection to box). Some people are running virtual machines off the QNAPs but I'm not sure about the main OS. What I would suggest is to keep one small hard drive in your case with the OS on it, and stick your other drives in an external NAS box which has much better heat dissipation. It's the horizontal stacking of multiple hard drives in the case that really cooks them.

Also, this external 'box' that was mentioned . . . what cabling does it have and can it be used to boot from also?

I've only looked at a couple of models in detail, the D-link has gigabit ethernet and USB. The QNAPs both come with dual gigabit ethernet, a couple of eSATA ports, plenty of USB ports, support iSCSI, have individual drive temperature alarms and can send you email or SMS warnings to complain if it gets too hot. But they are significantly more expensive.

Edited August 29, 2009 by Crushdepth

[d0ndela]

If you are looking for quality value-for-money NAS servers I would strongly recommend that you look at Buffalo. They are very easy to work with and I've nothing but good experiences with those NAS servers.

[bkk_mike]

To replace your system drive, you might want to look at using just a thumb drive, assuming your motherboard will let you boot from one. Swap needs to be on a physical disk, and user space probably needs more room, but 8Gb and 16Gb thumb drives are very cheap now and thats plenty for a system partition.

(Flash based drives are ideal for system data that doesn't change all the time. Just make sure the swap partition and your torrents aren't on it as huge numbers of write operations aren't a good idea. They still need to be going to a physical hard disk or to a non-flash-based ramdisk.) If your PC is writing to the swap partition all the time, that could also suggest more main system memory might reduce the hard drive usage.

Other than that, the things to look at are lower power settings - i.e. underpowering your CPU when you just have torrents going, (bringing it back up to play games) and the fans blowing at the disks that you've already looked at. (If it's AMD based - look at cool N quiet). Also making sure that drives are set to power down when not in use (although that doesn't work for the torrent drive). I know some people will say it's better for a drive to stay spinning than stop and start, which is true in some ways, but not if your trying to keep the temperature inside the case down).

Running the torrents to an external drive - even just a USB notebook drive - copying onto your main drive when they're finished, might be a good idea as then the only drive running all thew time would be outside the case. (Notebook drives are pretty sturdy, usually have higher operating temperatures, and don't need a separate power supply). I've had lots of 3.5" drives that didn't like running in an enclosure, especially larger, more recent drives, but never an issue with a notebook drive in one.)

A bigger case will help (more fans and heat sources are further apart), but make sure the PC is out of any direct sunlight and that there's room around it for air to circulate.

[JSixpack]

An interesting article > Experts: No cure in sight for unpredictable hard drive loss

Says "The researchers also found that drive failures did not increase with high temperatures or CPU utilization. In fact, they say, lower average temperatures actually correlate more strongly with failure. Only at "very high temperatures" does this change."

[Thanh-BKK]

Hello.

I have now added one of those cheapo HDD coolers to each of the drives (i didn't find the version with one larger fan so i got those with two smaller fans, the price was 150 Baht each) and replaced the 12 cm fan in front of the drives by one with ball bearing and 1,800 rpm (350 Baht). I did that Saturday evening and have not seen the drive temperature above 40 degrees Celsius since. So it appears to be working.

I's LOVE to have a flash-based system drive. However i need 80 GB for it and flash drives in that size cost an arm and a leg, i can't afford it. Smaller ones maybe, but if i need to put the "home" partition on an ordinary drive then what's the point..? Installing the system itself takes only 15 minutes, i could do that every day. What's important is the settings and customizations - and those sit on /home which has about 40 GB by itself.

Best regards.....

Thanh

[astral]

I have nothing good to say about WD drives.