Concerned About Temperatures

Greenlizard0 · 4 Aug 2007 at 11:46

I have 4 hard drives in my system, 2 36GB Raptors in RAID0, and 2 500GB AAKS in RAID 1. Recently my storage hard drive went boobies up and I noticed that it was sitting in my case around 49-56 degrees.

I have taken measures to try and prevent this happening again, but I'd still like some software to measure the temperature of my drives. The trouble is, now that they're in RAID programs like HDTune and Everest can't tell me anything. I have googled, but can't find anything that can monitor my individual drives in a way that I need.

I have also tried to install NTune from Nvidia's website (I have a Nvidia 590 onboard RAID controller) but that doesn't help either.

Any help offered will be very much appreciated.

Greenlizard0 · 5 Aug 2007 at 03:01

Ok Bump - I really do want some help with this

Big.Wayne · 5 Aug 2007 at 04:13

I personally don't know of any way to measure a hard drives temp when it is part of a raid array?

You should check the operating specs for your hard disks, I think they top out at approx 60°C.

Have you got any fans cooling your disks?

Greenlizard0 · 5 Aug 2007 at 11:31

Big.Wayne said:
I personally don't know of any way to measure a hard drives temp when it is part of a raid array?

You should check the operating specs for your hard disks, I think they top out at approx 60°C.

Have you got any fans cooling your disks?

I don't have at the moment, though I have fitted a Zalman heatpipe cooler on each of them. They still feel very hot to touch though. :/

York · 5 Aug 2007 at 11:33

If your storage drive failed it's highly unlikely it was due to heat problems. Google published a report where it had performed an analysis on their hard drive failures. They use off the shelf drives in all of their servers so nothing special.

They found that heat wasn't too much of a problem for a hard drive, but interestingly those that were kept a lot cooler were more prone to failure. Drives generally died in the first few months of use if they were going to die at all - regardless of heat, usage patterns or anything else.

Have a look at the Google report here

Greenlizard0 · 5 Aug 2007 at 11:53

York said:
If your storage drive failed it's highly unlikely it was due to heat problems. Google published a report where it had performed an analysis on their hard drive failures. They use off the shelf drives in all of their servers so nothing special.

They found that heat wasn't too much of a problem for a hard drive, but interestingly those that were kept a lot cooler were more prone to failure. Drives generally died in the first few months of use if they were going to die at all - regardless of heat, usage patterns or anything else.

Have a look at the Google report here

That's a very interesting point..hmm...does anybody else have any other things to think about

jak731 · 5 Aug 2007 at 14:20

If you still want some software to monitor drive temps try downloading PCwizard, it can monitor individual drive temps from the onboard sensor if the drive has one at all.

Greenlizard0 · 5 Aug 2007 at 15:30

jak731 said:
If you still want some software to monitor drive temps try downloading PCwizard, it can monitor individual drive temps from the onboard sensor if the drive has one at all.

I've just tried that - can you help exactly where these settings are in the program please? I'm struggling to find them.

jak731 · 5 Aug 2007 at 15:34

If my portable hard drive was working I could tell you straight away.

To the best of my memory its one of the small tabs on the left on the first screen with a speedometer style picture.

Greenlizard0 · 5 Aug 2007 at 17:35

jak731 said:
If my portable hard drive was working I could tell you straight away.

To the best of my memory its one of the small tabs on the left on the first screen with a speedometer style picture.

Wow, this is even more comphrensive than Everest home edition..

I still can't find what you mean though

jak731 · 5 Aug 2007 at 22:14

Under the hardware tab its the bottom right picture, underneath "multimedia" and to the right of "power status", there it should list your mainboard monitoring chip, CPU voltage, 3.3v rail voltage, 5v rail voltage, 12v rail voltage, chassis fan speed, processor temp, mainboard temp and underneath that all your hard drives should be listed with their respective temperatures.

Greenlizard0 · 6 Aug 2007 at 00:11

jak731 said:
Under the hardware tab its the bottom right picture, underneath "multimedia" and to the right of "power status", there it should list your mainboard monitoring chip, CPU voltage, 3.3v rail voltage, 5v rail voltage, 12v rail voltage, chassis fan speed, processor temp, mainboard temp and underneath that all your hard drives should be listed with their respective temperatures.

Unfortunetly it's not fella :/

Greenlizard0 · 10 Sep 2007 at 01:00

ByteJuggler · 10 Sep 2007 at 08:25

Well, normally I'd have suggested that you take the temp of one of your non-RAID drives as approximately representative of all the drives, as that's the best you can do, short of custom thermometers etc. However all you drives are part of arrays making that erm, a non-option... You don't feel like adding another drive to your system do you?

The only real alternatives I can think of, is for you to temporarily run the drives in non-raid mode, stress test the system (e.g. find something that continuously does seeks or set something up that continously copies files backwards and forwards or something), and then measure the temps while in this setup, in order to measure the maximum temperature reached. Then when you know what that is, you can rebuild the box with RAID0 again. The one other option is not to use the motherboard RAID0 support, and instead use Windows RAID0 support. That will mean that to the the drives temps will be measurerble but you'll still get all the benefit of RAID0 for the most part as well, the only difference is it will be managed solely by the OS/in software.

Greenlizard0 · 16 Sep 2007 at 01:16

Hmm, thanks for the reply ByteJuggler.

The trouble is, at this stage I have no intention of disbanding any of my arrays. I didn't realise that it would be this hard to monitor the temperatures.

Cupra · 16 Sep 2007 at 01:55

York said:
If your storage drive failed it's highly unlikely it was due to heat problems. Google published a report where it had performed an analysis on their hard drive failures. They use off the shelf drives in all of their servers so nothing special.

They found that heat wasn't too much of a problem for a hard drive, but interestingly those that were kept a lot cooler were more prone to failure. Drives generally died in the first few months of use if they were going to die at all - regardless of heat, usage patterns or anything else.

Have a look at the Google report here

i remember readign that a while ago, was a cracking read, no point in getting a new drive for nothing u need to be using it to make sure it will break within warranty