- External drive enclosure reliability
- Posted by Yousuf Khan on April 22nd, 2008
I tend to think that it would be best that an external drive enclosure
would be best if it had active cooling built-in (i.e. a fan). However,
I've recently seen a drive fail inside an actively-cooled enclosure so
badly that Spinrite couldn't even recover it. So I'm not sure about the
value of active cooling anymore. I have seen an aluminum portable
enclosure with a lot of good features (USB2.0 & e-SATA) for a really
cheap price, but from what I see of it, it doesn't seem to have any fans
in it. Should I worry about it, or is aluminum a good enough conductor
of heat by itself?
Yousuf Khan
- Posted by Rod Speed on April 22nd, 2008
Yousuf Khan <bbbl67@yahoo.com> wrote:
The technical term for that is 'pathetically inadequate sample'
Nope, some drives do get stinking hot in aluminium enclosures,
particularly the enclosures that dont have a good conductive
heat path from the drive to the enclosure.
Then again, some enclosures with fans dont move much air over the drive either.
At least with eSATA you can monitor the drive SMART temperature.
- Posted by Folkert Rienstra on April 22nd, 2008
Rod Speed wrote in news:675jemF2nb39rU1@mid.individual.net
Which is most all of them if they don't use heat conductive sheeting
between the drive sides and the mounting rails (and the mounting rails
and the rest of the enclosure if not an integral part of the shell).
Worse even for those that use the bottom mounting holes of the drive.
Also, blackened aluminum radiates heat better to the environment than
blank anodized aluminum.
Provided they don't use an eSATA conversion chip with a limited vocabulary.
- Posted by Folkert Rienstra on April 22nd, 2008
Yousuf Khan wrote in news:480d8632@news.bnb-lp.com
Wow, Spinrite couldn't even recover the drive. That's really bad.
Have you called Steve and complained about that?
Obviously recovering a cooled drive should be a doddle for SpinRite.
I would ask my money back if I were you.
Yeah, maybe somebody even makes a profit on it. Figure that.
It should be forbidden.
- Posted by Arno Wagner on April 22nd, 2008
Previously Yousuf Khan <bbbl67@yahoo.com> wrote:
Depends. You need to measure it. I have had good and bad experiences,
including one Maxtor that did heat up to 72C (and then failed) when
idle (!) in an aluminium enclosure.
A good idea is to go for a low power drive (e.g. Samsung).
(I cannot recommend WDs GP series, because while they
are low-poer, they are incompatible with at least one
current SATA/USB enclosure chipset, see my recent review
here)
As to the failure despite cooling: Cooling eleminates one
problem, but drives can fail from several ones. Cooling a
drive well will have no impact on the other sources of failure.
Cooling it badly will just add one problem that can kill a
drive by itself.
Arno
- Posted by bbbl67 on April 22nd, 2008
On Apr 22, 3:46 am, "Rod Speed" <rod.speed....@gmail.com> wrote:
Maybe, but it makes you wonder, considering the enclosure was from a
well-known brand (Everex), and the drive was only six-months old.
Spinrite 6.0 went through it and found hundreds of unreadable, only
partially recoverable, sectors just in the first few megabytes,
partition table was completely trashed along with just about
everything else.
That's what I figure happened to this guy whose drive got trashed.
That is a good point.
Yousuf Khan
- Posted by Rod Speed on April 22nd, 2008
Folkert Rienstra <see_reply-to@myweb.nl> wrote
The main way they lose heat is by convection from the outside, not radiation.
- Posted by Rod Speed on April 22nd, 2008
bbbl67 <yjkhan@gmail.com> wrote
No maybe about it.
You dont know how the drive would have gone used internally.
Thats not unusual with a drive that got stinking hot.
Not surprising with that many errors in the first few MB.
Yeah, plenty of them just have a fan that doesnt do much at all.
- Posted by Yousuf Khan on April 23rd, 2008
Folkert Rienstra wrote:
Isn't eSATA just simply SATA with a different connector?
Yousuf Khan
- Posted by Timothy Daniels on April 23rd, 2008
"Yousuf Khan" wrote:
eSATA specs include a connector that accommodates
a shielding connection to ground, a shielded cable, and
wider windows on the transceiver levels due to the longer
cable length allowed (up to 2 meters). Here's a white paper
by Silicon Image:
https://www.sata-io.org/documents/Ex...WP%2011-09.pdf
*TimDaniels*
- Posted by Timothy Daniels on April 23rd, 2008
"Yousuf Khan" wrote:
Here's an external eSATA enclosure with a cooling fan mounted
against the base of the hard drive:
http://kingwin.com/product_pages/jt35ebk.asp
I have such a cooling fan configuration in the tray of my Kingwin
removable hard drive and it keeps the hard drive case very cool
(i.e. lower than body temperature). The body of the enclosure is
aluminum, and TigerDirect sells the sister model that also has USB
for $35:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...563&CatId=2780
*TimDaniels*
- Posted by Folkert Rienstra on April 23rd, 2008
Timothy Daniels wrote in news:480ecf30$0$30164$4c368faf@roadrunner.com
And if that part (eSATA-to-SATA) is done by a chip that is also
doing the USB to SATA conversion like this one:
http://www.oxsemi.com/products/storage/OXU921DS.html
then you don't know what may have been left out.
