[mythtv-users] new rig ... help with specs

jedi jedi at mishnet.org
Wed Sep 23 13:24:29 UTC 2009


On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 09:34:04AM -0600, Brian Wood wrote:
> On Tuesday 22 September 2009 09:23:27 Chris Stevens wrote:
> > The situation with RAID hard drives is fairly straight-forward: buy the
> > enterprise versions - eg. Seagate 750 ES. These have MTB of around
> > 3,000,000 hours which is over 300 years and are only a bit more
> > expensive.
> >
> > But there is just one primary rule for any HD: KEEP THEM COOL. Drives go
> > very quickly if you let them overheat. You can actually buy any old
> > rubbish so long as you follow this rule.
> 
> I would think so as well, but:
> 
> The Google paper on hard drive reliability seemed to contradict this seemingly 
> common sense idea.
> 
> They were unable to show much of a correlation between temperature and failure 
> rates.
> 
> I (and many others) found this odd.
> 
> I still try and keep my drives as cool as possible, electronics in general 
> likes cooler temperatures, but I think about it more now, having read the 
> Google paper.

    I once had a Sun NUMA machine that my company quite literally kept
in a closet. This company was in the desert so we had the usual 115 
degree summer temperatures. The AC in that building was shoddy and the
temperature in our "server" room was often over 100.

    When the matter was discussed with Sun support they told us that the
temperature wasn't important as much as temperature fluctuations were. 
They said that if the room is going to get to 100 then it should stay
there all the time and not go back and forth between 70 and 100. The
fluctuations are what will cause the hardware to fail.

    It was a really weird situation all around...


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