Cool HDD

Question: Will fitting a hard drive with an HDD cooler increase its lifetime dramatically or not-so dramatically?

SATA drives don't get that hot. Don't pussify yur drives.

>>2
They never break?

>>1
get a silent aluminium one that covers the drive completly, reducing noise and heat a lot
well i have one that cost me like 70 bucks

>>3
If you want a drive that won't break, get SCSI drives. Those do get hotter but that's mostly because they have 15k rpm which is more than double of what SATA drives do. But they are much more reliable.

One drive, don't bother.

Several drives stacked on top of each other, put a fan in front of it.

Endgame: Drives break. Make backups.

>>6
I agree.  Backup, or make a simple RAID0 with 2 cheap drives and a hardware controller.  One drive WILL die eventually, but you're almost certain to not lose the other one at the same time.

>>7
Eventually means what in years?
And how does cooling affect it's life expectancy?

>>8
"Eventually" means that the chance of it happening over the life of the machine is too high to risk.

Cooling hard drives is a new one to me.  I don't know enough about their failures due to heat, to decide that one.  Certainly, the drive should get up to a uniform operating temperature, but I'm not sure how exceeding that temperature affects the drive's lifespan.  Heat breaks all chips eventually, but how robust are the chips on these drives in the first place?

It's hard to tell an average life expectancy of hard drives in general. Certain manufacturers have the reputation of having build more series that were prone to failure quickly than others. Other manufacturers have a better reputation but that doesn't mean you can't get unlucky when you buy a drive from them. SCSI drives do tend to last longer because they are generally build for server usage as opposed to most SATA ones. There are SATA discs that are specifically built for use in storage though, so they might me more reliable than other SATA ones.

tl;dl: If you're that worried about disc failure, read up on which companies usually produce reliable discs, buy two or more and build a RAID 0 or 5.

>>7
>>10
OP, don't use RAID0. RAID0 is disk striping. There is no safety net. All it will do is double the chances of your drives going down, since you are now relying on two drives rather than one. When you lose one of the drives, you will lose nearly all of your data.

If you want to be able to survive one hard drive failure, then go for RAID5 (Parity). If you want to withstand two or more in-use hard drives failing, go with RAID1(Mirroring) or any other RAID setup with RAID1 included.

>>11
Oops, my error.  I was thinking mirroring and mistakenly said RAID0.  Thanks.