is my system drive getting too hot?

[Mark J Dulcey]

On 11/8/2009 8:12 PM, Stephen Adler wrote:
> Guys,
>
> I spent a bunch of time setting up smartd on my system at work last week
> and now I'm getting nightly e-mails regarding my disk drives. (the
> latest one is cut and pasted into the e-mail.) notice sda, and the
> temperatures over 100. Is this something I need to worry about? The sda
> is a WD drive, while all the other drives are seagate.

Certainly a possibility. Last month I suffered two drive failures: one 
80GB drive in my email server (half of a mirrored pair) and one 200GB 
drive (one part of a five-drive RAID 5 array). Both were WD drives and 
both seem to still be partially functional but run very very hot, much 
hotter than the Seagate and Maxtor drives that are still in use. Both 
have been retired; the 5x200GB array has been replaced with a mirrored 
pair of new 1.5TB drives, and the 2x80 pair has been replaced with a 
2x200 pair salvaged from the former RAID 5 set. I haven't yet figured 
out what to do with the remaining 80GB drive.

 From what I've heard about RAID 5, I'm fortunate that I got out with 
just the one drive failure and got all the data safely onto new disks 
before another drive failure. But it might help that the 5 drives were 
NOT matched; there were two Seagate, two Maxtor, and one WD, and no two 
drives were from the same manufacturing lot. The four remaining 200GB 
drives have been divided between two 200GB mirrored setups (one here and 
one at a friend's house) and each is a mismatched pair; I deliberately 
did NOT put the ones from the same manufacturer together to minimize the 
probability of correlated failures.