Andrew J. Rozsa wrote:
> Secondly, I think I will upgrade to 1, max 2, much larger drives to 
> replace 4 or 5 of the 120 Gig ones, keeping the box cooler that way (I 
> am told Samsungs run nice and quiet and cool).

The other advantage of fewer, larger drives is less power consumed and 
less noise (especially if the older drives are ball-bearing vs the newer 
fluid-bearing drives).  The older ball-bearing drives would develop a 
distinct 120Hz pitch whine as they aged.

The downside is that if a drive fails, you lose more data... so plan for 
drive failure.

My only recommendation for drives is to go for the units with at least 
3-year warranties.  I'm using a lot of Seagate drives lately because 
they're the only ones using Perpendicular Recording.  (Their 7200.10 
Barracuda series drives.)

If you really get technical (and this is difficult to get hard data), go 
with drives that give you the desired capacity while using fewer 
platters.  Fewer platters usually means less power consumed and less 
heat.  But very few manufacturers will release information on the number 
of platters used within a particular model.

> Any experience with the round IDE/floppy cables? I feel tempted to 
> replace all the ribbons to allow more air movement. I have had the box 
> running  with the cover off and it sure feels like there is a lot of 
> heat coming from the chip and the drives. Maybe it's my imagination.

I've used them, never had an issue... as always, your mileage may vary.

Heat is one of the reasons that I've moved to larger boxes or dedicated 
cooling fans for hard drives over the years.  CPUs are good (mostly) at 
protecting themselves, but hard drives will run until they die from the 
heat.  My preference is to keep hard drive operating temperatures well 
below 45C (30-40C is preferable).  If the drive is too warm to 
comfortably touch while running, it's too warm to survive very long. 
Anything over 45C is probably too hot.  Anything over 50C is almost 
certainly too hot.

My best system to date kept the drives at about 5C (~30C) above ambient 
room temperature and they only rose to 7C (~32C) above ambient room 
temperature when active.  Usually I can manage 40C to 45C in a room that 
is 28C.  A drive that changes temperature more then 5-10C between idle 
and active is probably not properly cooled (i.e. 35C when idle but zooms 
up to 50C when active).

One of my first builds attempted to pack 2 hard drives, GeForce Ti4500 
AGP card and an AthlonXP 2700+ into a standard desktop case.  Internal 
case temps (measured with digital thermometers with remote leads) was up 
around 50C.  Way too warm.  Moving the parts into an early Antec Sonata 
case resulted in significant temperature drops across the board.  Other, 
larger, cases would've resulted in even better temperature drops.

If you have spare 5.25" external drive bays, there are some good cooling 
solutions that can be fitted into those locations.  One takes up (2) 
5.25" bays and allows you to pack in (3) 3.5" drives cooled by a 
somewhat quiet 80mm fan.  However, for better cooling, I recommend only 
putting (2) 3.5" drives in it; with a 0.5" gap between the two drives. 
MWave carries this one under part# BA21364.

The other trick is to make sure air comes in the front of the case via 
optional intake fans and that all of the rear fans are set to exhaust 
the hot air from the case.

As always, I recommend SpeedFan for looking at system temperatures.  It 
works with most motherboard sensors and hard drive S.M.A.R.T. sensors.

http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

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