Heat failures

[ArmyITGuy]

I have ...er well had three WD 160GB drives in a software raid 5. I've lost two due to heat. I've since replaced the array with a single 250GB drive and a fan in one of the open bays.

QUESTION IS: What exactly fails on the drive? Is it the platter itself, the read/write head, the chips or some combination, when a drive dies due to excessive heat?

 

[paparazi]

Without a description of their symptoms ie: noises? or that they were missing in bios perhaps? it's hard to say what exactly failed.
What you can say however is excessive heat accelerates all aspects of wear and increases failure rate substantially. We have to get this into context as well, hard drives do get warm and are designed to run reliably upto a certain temperature (low 50's C) seems to be the norm for most, which is fairly warm to the touch.
The most common reason for the heat build up however is lack of air movement around the hard drives so having cool air blowing across the drives is usually sufficient to keep those temps in check.
Martin



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[ArmyITGuy]

They were in BIOS, they were not making noises, at least not that I could hear. The loudes thing was the fans trying to cool the box as the drives heated up.

Is there some way to check? I'd hate to think these guys were toast (pardon the expression), without checking.

 

[greif1]

1) You can feel the drive mechnically spin up when power is applied, if you feel nothing then the motor no go and all is lost.
You need to have these out of a case to feel this, or the other vibrations get in the way.
2) If the drive spins and talks (is recognized in bios) you can run wddiag fixit utils which can often fix low level things. WD website has these, also can be found and ran from the Ultimate Boot CD which is very handy and free.
gr