DoN. Nichols wrote:
<snip>
> I've been trying to remember. IIRC, someone posted to this
> newsgroup within the last year a fairly simple C program which reads that
> information. And, I think that it may also report the temperature at
> which it decides to shut down as well. I compiled it, and it worked
> nicely, but I now forget its name. (One of the hazards of having
> programs without man pages. :-)
>
> One thing which is a major superset of that is:
>
> smartmontools-5.33
>
> which might be a good idea while running striped disks anyway.

thanks. i'll check that out. it's even in FreeBSD's ports. i didn't
realize that SCSI drives also supported SMART. thought it was an IDE
only thing, but i see now that's not the case.

<snip>
> Note that there is another multipack which looks just like what
> you have, except that it has more LEDs on the front, and it can accept
> twelve of the 1" high drives, instead of six of the 1.6" high drives.

now /that/ would be nice

> I think that the drive should have a matching height spud, to
> make the cooling better.

i'm not sure if the spud would have much to do with heat problems. they
/are/ in the 1" spuds though, so who knows..

> But -- it *may* translate to all six drives being run at full
> speed, if the data transfer path (and the CPU) are fast enough to accept
> all six drives worth of maximum throughput. In that case, there would
> be more heat generated than with a single drive being run at maximum
> throughput at a time.

that's a good point. by "heavy load", i mean transfering files from
those drives to my file server and running multiple instances of IO
intensive apps (dvdauthor, avidemux, etc) that don't require much cpu.
i've started doing most of that on my Alpha in another room to cut down
on the load on my workstation because of the problems with these drives.

> I would be tempted to find six of the 1" 18GB drives to replace
> your 1.6" ones. Start by replacing the one which overheats, as it may
> simply have a lower overtemperature threshold. If necessary, replace
> them all. The 1" disks typically run cooler than the 1.6" ones of
> similar capacity.

in noticing more over the weekend i see that it tends to be id 1,2,and 3
that seem to fail most often (the ones in the back) but occasionaly
it'll be id 4 or 6 (i never saw it happen on 5). judging by the lights
on the front at least.. the ones that go out, i assume, are the ones
that have the issue at the moment...
new drives aren't exactly in my budget right now. i may end up taking
the ones out of the monsterous DEC enclosure and putting them in here
(PITA and silly design i might add having them totally enclosed in their
own individual drive bays). i really like this little Sun box because
of the small footprint, but if this doesn't work then i'll need to come
up with room for the big DEC..
thanks again for the advice. i appreciate it.

--
- - james <at> hal-pc.org - -

In every dictatorship, ownership of guns is outlawed.
A state treads carefully when the citizens are armed.
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