Re: HDD general (was: RE: HDD clicking)
On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 02:48:36PM -0800, Paul Johnson wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 04:13:27PM -0500, Daniel Barclay wrote:
> > Paul Johnson wrote:
> > > ...
> > > If it's a desktop box, don't worry about letting them spin down at
> > > all, your speakers probably draw more power than your hard drive.
> >
> > Have you even felt how warm disk drives get?
>
> Yes. But this goes with any piece of mechanical equipment. Look at
> what's going in to it: 12V, DC.
I fail to follow your logic here. Why should running off 12VDC
automatically make it get hot? Or being mechanical? I could supply a
long and boring list of counter-examples :-)
What matters is the *power* : voltage multiplied by current. Looking
at the label of the most easily visible drive in my system - an old 2
gig half-height Digital SCSI drive - it consumes 0.73A at 12V and
0.91A at 5V. That's roughly 14W; approximately the power of a (weedy
little) soldering iron; the sort Antex sell in DIY stores to people
who then wonder why they can't solder anything with it. *Now* it makes
sense; stick the element from a soldering iron in the middle of a lump
of metal the size of a hard drive, and you can see it'll get hot after
a while.
On the other hand, the quiescent consumption, ie. just spinning away
to itself, not moving the head, not spinning up, not moving data, is
probably a lot less than 14W; I've never measured it, not sure why.
On the third hand, disk drives aren't usually very well mounted in a
normal PC chassis as regards cooling - usually stacked up in a lump of
two or three, inside a little cage, both of which features make it
hard to direct an airstream over them, wherever you put the fan.
I have a Seagate HD where the problem is made worse by this little
rubber jacket they put round it with dire warnings about voiding the
warranty if you take it off. It's out of warranty now, so I'll
probably take it off sooner or later.
Pigeon
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