Just bought a 3TB Seagate external drive that had a drive inside that (I think) costs about £10 more on its own. Put the 3TB in the server and maybe going to have the 1TB as some sort of spare external drive. Probably not an amazing idea as a backup drive if it's not reliable.

Is hard drives overheating a big issue? Because the 1TB was in the middle of a set of 5 hard drives.

Should I spread the bottom 5 hard drives out a bit better?

Either that or boost ventilation. # of drives does seem excessive to me, and an invitation to heat/psu issues. Are you just trying to eek out some extra life from old, small drives?

Depends what you class as small.

160GB (OS drive)
400GB

10GB (old server OS drive that has now been pulled)

500GB
500GB
3TB (was 1TB position)
2TB
2TB

I might get another 5.25 to 3.5 bracket and pop the 3TB at the top.

In terms of what's on the store shelves currently, anything <1TB. I think they're cheap enough that you could replace the 4 small drives with one drive for an overall cooler and less power-hungry set up. Though you'd have to copy (and possibly reinstall) stuff, which is never fun. You could still use the small drives in usb for backups.

If I have to stack my drives like that I make sure to put a fan at the front so air can at least get pulled through and keep them somewhat cool.  You might be able to find some software that will monitor/report the temperature of the drives.

Pretty much what I'm thinking. I've ordered a 5.25 to 3.25 bracket to move it up top and I'll stick a fan at the front and fan at the back in/out.

I put a high cfm case fan on the side panel and pull off front drive bay covers. Also I do not stack a half-dozen drives.

Where is your sense of adventure?

scattered across a couple dozen dead hard drives.

Dear North America, please learn the word 'of' and its use in context with the word 'couple' when referring to a few objects or things.

Yours faithfully,

The Rest of the English Speaking World.

Dear anyone who wants to listen,

Please feel free to pelt that pretentious twerp with a cat o'nine tails a few times until he has at least a couple dozen bruises.

Yours sincerely,

Me.

I'm gonna larn you!

I probably deserve it.  :-((

Some bytes for thought (sorry (fail) )

http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

Looks like I have the least reliable 3TB drive.....and every other drive is Seagate.

Though this 1TB failure is the only (touch wood, yj) Seagate drive that has failed yet.

Good find!

I've been looking at drives for a new NAS, and was favouring the WD Red or 5s (which is a tad pricey!) Both are specified for NAS.

But it looks like Hitachi are worth a look (although I think they're now HGST and owned by WD anyway)

Yeah WD own Hitachi, no idea how much they've merged since. Whether it will mean WD drives get better or Hitachi drivers get worse....or both.

Never bothered with Green or Low Power drives and not sure why I would. Is HDD power consumption really that high to worry about?

From the link that you posted, I don't really think that there's a huge difference between WD and Hitachi in terms of reliability, they both seem good enough. As one poster noted, all companies have one disaster model every now and then (I've been the 'proud' owner of four 75GXP deathstars), so what really matters is consistency, and both seem to be pretty consistent (bear in mind that Backblaze have about five times as much experience with Seagate or Hitachi as WD).

As for the Greens, I can see why they'd be more prone to failure under conditions of intermittent loading. In the big scheme of things, I can't help but think that the energy savings are fairly trivial for the sorts of uses we'd have.

Of course, the "5s" referred to by your correspondent is in fact the Se.

And he has now purchased four of them, and a nice little NAS to put them in. It's only taken him a couple of years to make this decision, bless the little cunt's little cotton socks.

Aaaaand another one bites the dust by the looks of it. One of the 500 GB drives looks to be fucked.