I have an old system with 2 18 Gig SCSI disks. One IBM and one Seagate. Both run very hot! I added extra cooling fans. Both fans failed about 2 years ago. Only the CPU and power supply fans still work. The disk drives are too hot to touch. Much too hot to touch! The system is running 99.99% of the time. No disk problems. The system is 4-5 years old as a guess. To help date it, it is a P3-350Mhz. My wife uses this computer. :)
The lack of start-stop cycles may work in your favor; you don't have as many thermal expansion/contraction cycles or startup electrical surges to worry about. Of course, if stiction strikes after a power-off, you could be in trouble...
In any case, it's not a bad idea to set up smartd and look after your system logs. If your drives have temperature sensors, it's a good idea to tell smartd to report raw values for temperature (usually -r 194 -R 194 in the smartd.conf file); the normalized values look wacky.
I also have hddtemp and the hddtemp plugin for gkrellm, so I can easily check the temperatures on my desktop, at least for my four-drive SATA RAID5 array. My older 30GB Maxtors don't have temperature sensors, but they're in the same fan-cooled bays as the Samsung SATA drives, and they all run reasonably cool to the touch. Current room temperature is about 28 C, and the temperature display reports 29-33 C for the drives in the array.
Russ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
