"Ron" wrote in message

On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 13:04:30 -0400, "Arny Krueger"
wrote:

"Ron" wrote in message

On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 18:53:47 GMT, "John Doe"
wrote:

Have you put your hand on top of it after it has been running for a
few hours? It is hotter than hell and will likely kill the drive
and melt the case. A $3 fan would have taken care of the problem.

Yes, I've touched it after many hours of use. It's hot, but not
excessively so (even though I don't know what is the current
ambient temprature in hell).

If you can keep your fingers on the case for any amount of time, its
under 120 degres F.

I should ahve been more specific -- It's probably aroundt 80 degrees
F, after running for quite a while. That's what I meant by hot, but
not excessively so.

The room I'm sitting in right now is 84F. That ain't hot at all!

However, if this the external case, the internal guts of the hard
drive are probably a lot hotter, and that might not be a good thing.

This is generally true. But the previous poster was second guessing
the design engineer. The case is metal and if the drive is
theramally attached, the internal temperature could be only a few
degrees higher.

Agreed.

The is still very much alive and case
is metal and won't melt at 10 times the temprature.

Melting the case would be a very bad thing, even if its just plastic.
Depending on the type of plastic, it might start getting soft
someplace around the boiling point of water. I wouldn't expect a
hard drive to last very long at that temperature. It might stop
working long before it got that hot.

I was joking :-). The person calimed that " It is hotter than hell
and will likely kill the drive". It's just so happens that I
personally don't think so.

Not if we're on a scale where 80F is "hot".

It came with a 1 year warranty. If it doesn't die in 1 year, it will
probably last much longer than that.

Hard drive infant mortality is usually over with in a month or
three. If you're out a year, the overall failure rate has decreased,
but it still could fail at any time.

Agreed. But that's not temperature related.

Yes it is.

Temperture is a relevant variable in just about any discussion of the life
of an electronic or mechanical assembly.

Before buying it I read many
reviews. There weren't complaints about premature failures. You are
possibly talking about a different make or model?

One thing about hard drives, you never know how many times they were
dropped or overheated and only seemed to be completely undamaged.

Well, overheating effects tend to be binary. If overheating doesn't
cause catastrophic damage, it usually causes none or extremely
little.

Not at all. But first, we have to talk about what constitutes hot. IME *hot*
starts someplace around too hot to touch for any length of time, and works
up to things that will give you various medical degrees of burn. Obviously
we have different ideas about what constitutes hot for say the engine in a
car versus parts in a PC. The coolest parts of a car engine is just fine at
temperatures that will give you maybe a second burn given some time. The
hottest parts of a car engine can give you a third degree burn and be just
fine with themselves. PC parts tempertures intersect with car parts
someplace around the car's engine computer.

However, this is neither here nor there. If the design
allows overheating (no, I do not take the previous post as gospel),
then it's a **** poor design, period.

I'm under the impression that PCs have parts that *normally* run hotter than
similar parts ran 10 years ago. CPU chips are a good example. In the days of
Pentium-1 Dell engineers were quoted as saying that chip temperatures of
115F was about as far as they want to go. Today it's pretty well accepted
that we will run CPUs 25 to 40 degrees hotter than that.

Feeling hot to the touch is close to immaterial.

I think that as long as you can keep your finger on something in a PC for 5
minutes without a lot of pain or damage, then there's no problem and cooling
it further won't do much for life under normal operating conditions.
Overclocking is a different situation.

The bottom line is failure rate (MTBF). and if
that's long enough, I don't care about operating temperature.

Right, but you might informative to find out what temperature does to the
MTBF of parts like electrolytic caps, which most PCs are full of.

For a simple example: http://www.elna-america.com/MTBF.htm

So, read the MTBF spec and ignore people that make references to hell

Indeed.