ML350 and full set of disks

bigredshark · 20 Jan 2009 at 15:39

A quick one guys, I've started prepping an ML350 with a full set of 72GB 15k SFF SAS drives, after a few hours one of the disks showed as failed on the indicator light. No sweat I thought, happens occassionally, I'll just replace it...

So I popped it out and as I grabbed it to extract it, it became apparent it was about to burst into flames (which resulted in much swearing and throwing said drive across the lab).

Basically, after a couple of hours running, fully populated with 15k drives, the drives become too hot to touch (I have burns on my fingers from that first one, which smells slightly of burning). I suspect left to themselves they'd all fail fairly sharpish.

Does anybody have any experience of this, or running an ML350 fully populated with 10k SFF drives , these will be cooler but I can't imagine that much cooler, I'll consider using these as I need this box fairly urgently.

and I suppose I should add I recommend against this configuration for now, unless you want to test your fire suppression systems. I've also summoned an HP engineer for his opinion...

bigredshark · 20 Jan 2009 at 17:50

Yeah, I can't see a mount for the redundant fan kit anywhere near the hard disks though...

Nothing failed, the damn thing is brand new!

bigredshark · 21 Jan 2009 at 10:29

There's only 8 drives in it. Which is the maximum you're correct. Having run it overnight, it looks fine, so I suspect the problem was courtesy of running it with the top removed in the lab (which I think is fairly rubbish - an hour with the top removed and the hard drives start melting - great!). Either way HP will be here in a few hours to give me their pronouncement and replace all the dead bits...

bigredshark · 21 Jan 2009 at 21:24

Curiosityx said:
I wouldnt mention you left the side off the case as im quite confident it voids the warrenty, same goes if you dont use filler pannels for unpopulated drive bays. Ive seen this of several occasions although after deploying many of DL320, 360, 380 and the ML range for the last several years ive yet to see a disk show the same symptoms as described here.

Oh quite, I won't be mentioning that to them. I've actually run DL380s without the top for a fair while (then again their fan setup is much better than the ML350) so I thought I'd like get away with it on what is essentially a tower server...

We'll know better next time then!