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blakespot · Jun 21, 2004, 01:56 PM

Someone in Apple's discussion forums expressed their belief that there was not sufficient cooling in the G5 to allow two SATA HD's to sit in the bays without risk of failure. I am adding a Raptor 74G 10,000 RPM drive to my on-order G5 and that Raptor is hotter than perhaps any other SATA drive. Am I in for trouble?

Are there issues here?

Did Apple change the fan speed of the drive bay fans at some point recently?

Thanks.

blakespot

Leonard · Jun 21, 2004, 02:27 PM

I haven't heard of any HD failure problems in the G5s, and I've heard of many people putting 2 HDs in there, even 2 Raptors. 2 Raptors make a nice fast RAID and give the G5 an extra ooomph of power.

Arkham_c · Jun 21, 2004, 03:18 PM

I have two 160 GB SATA drives in my G5. No problems so far (about 3 months in that configuration).

With that said, my friend had two 250GB SATA drives in his G5 and both of them failed within a week of each other.

blakespot · Jun 21, 2004, 03:28 PM

Originally posted by Arkham_c:
With that said, my friend had two 250GB SATA drives in his G5 and both of them failed within a week of each other. [/B]

That's an interesting report... Not too comforting.

blakespot

Ganesha · Jun 21, 2004, 03:50 PM

Originally posted by blakespot:
Did Apple change the fan speed of the drive bay fans at some point recently?

Yes, in 10.3.3 and beyond, the set-points of the drive-bay fans have been set lower, i.e. the fan revs up at lower temperatures now.

metfoo · Jun 21, 2004, 04:04 PM

i have 2 200GB drives in my system and have never had any heat related problems

k2director · Jun 21, 2004, 07:42 PM

I got my dual 2Ghz G5 in late September, and have had two 250 gig drives ever since with no problems.

Leonis · Jun 21, 2004, 07:47 PM

I did have one hard drive died first month after I bought my G5.

After I got the replacement drive I unplugged the hard drive bay heat sensor to let the fan spin at full speed all the time and have seen no problem with the two hard drives.

macpow · Jun 21, 2004, 07:57 PM

Bought my 2Ghz G5 in August... I also had my 2nd 250 GB drive fail after a month. New drive has been ok... but I still have heat concerns.

blakespot · Jun 22, 2004, 12:36 AM

So...its sounds like a heat problem w/ two HD's may be a very real thing on the G5, looking at all these reports. At least I should disable fan speed management on hte HD bay and have it goingfull tilt, it seems. How is this done?

I'm adding a hot 74GB Raptor... Surprised not more discussion about this.

blakespot

wulf · Jun 22, 2004, 05:10 AM

Well we got a dual 2GHz G5 for video editing, and the 2nd drive failed soon after purchase (about a month).

I don't think heat is the culprit; it seems most likely that there were a whole load of dodgy SATA drives going into the G5s. If it goes in the first few weeks (with virtually no usage, in our case) then the drive was blatantly a dud.

I'm not saying heat can't be a problem, but my interpretation of these reports is that the SATA drives Apple has been putting in the G5s have had very poor QC. IMHO.

macpow · Jun 22, 2004, 05:27 AM

My failed drive was a self-installed Maxtor. Not factory installed.

wulf · Jun 22, 2004, 05:44 AM

Originally posted by macpow:
My failed drive was a self-installed Maxtor. Not factory installed.

Maybe it's Maxtor drives? Our BTO drives were Maxtor.

Who knows, maybe it is heat, but since we got the drive replaced, we've been running both internals as a striped RAID to do uncompressed video. Much heavier usage than before, also in much warmer weather. Seems to me if heat were the reason for failure, they would have gone bad again by now.

pdovinh · Jun 22, 2004, 01:08 PM

Hi blakespot,

I'm no expert, but I like to share with you my comfort level about hard drives and no heat-related problems of the several G3, G4s, and a G5 that I have:

I have installed:

4 SCSI drives inside a B&W G3 400, running off two Adaptec's 39160's, 24/7, over 3.5 years, currently running 10.3.4.

2 ATA and 2 SCSI drives inside a G4 DP 800, 24/7, over 2 years, currently running 10.3.4.

4 ATA drives inside a G4 DP 1.4, 24/7, over a year, currently running 10.3.4.

2 Maxtor SATA 250s, and 2 WD Raptor 74 inside a G5 DP 2.0, currently running 10.3.4. I have two Maxtor drives for almost a year now, STRIPED. Two weeks ago, I relocated the Maxtor drives to on top of the internal DVD drive and installed the two Raptor 74s in the slots. I love them Raptors! They are very quiet and super fast. They are ON continuously and I have no heat problems.

I have had 3 drives failed on me over the years, but nothing recently. I still have one of the original internal HyperDrive from GCC for my Mac Plus!

pd

tooki · Jun 22, 2004, 01:19 PM

Originally posted by blakespot:
So...its sounds like a heat problem w/ two HD's may be a very real thing on the G5, looking at all these reports.

Please consider that self-reported data (such as a forum) is severely skewed: the people who don't have problems for the most part are not participating. People are quick to complain when something's wrong, but nobody says anything when everything's right.

That said, I'm also not really totally convinced that heat means instant death to a drive: a friend of mine had a server with a first-generation (=very hot) 7200RPM drive, in a case with no fans (!). The drive literally got so hot you couldn't touch it for more than a second, but it chugged on for years. That server got passed on to someone else, but to my best knowledge, it's still working.

tooki

blakespot · Jun 22, 2004, 07:04 PM

I understand that people with no problems do not generally chime in. But I've had many computers over the past 20+ years and have only had one hard disk failure. These reports sound seem to show unusually prevalent failures.

blakespot

tooki · Jun 23, 2004, 01:30 AM

Because the people without drive failures aren't posting as much!!

These "reports" are statistically meaningless because a) it's voluntary, self-reported data, and b) it's biased because the original question suggests that there may be a problem.

Something like 500,000 G5's have been sold so far. There are 4 -- FOUR -- reports of bad drives in here. That is statistically meaningless. Four more people report not having any trouble. Considering the skew from the fact that satisfied customers don't post, that really indicates that there is no problem.

Add to that the fact that modern 7200 RPM drives basically don't create any meaningful amount of heat. It's just not a problem.

tooki

Scotttheking · Jun 23, 2004, 01:48 AM

Originally posted by tooki:

Add to that the fact that modern 7200 RPM drives basically don't create any meaningful amount of heat. It's just not a problem.

tooki

Erm...
IBM Deathstars...

Spliffdaddy · Jun 23, 2004, 02:10 AM

Typical hard drive power consumption (7200rpm IBM Deskstar w/5 platters)

12 watts - read/write/seek

8 watts - idle

1.5 watts - standy / sleep

If you assume that nearly all the electricty becomes heat (which it does) - then excessive heat shouldn't be an issue that concerns you.

It's a mere 12 watts and the it has a massive surface area from which to dissipate that heat.

hard drives die for no reason whatsoever, mostly.

tooki · Jun 23, 2004, 12:09 PM

Originally posted by Scotttheking:
Erm...
IBM Deathstars...

The 75GXP's (no other IBM model has ever shown any congenital defect) didn't overheat -- they just up and died.

Originally posted by Spliffdaddy:
...It's a mere 12 watts and the it has a massive surface area from which to dissipate that heat.

hard drives die for no reason whatsoever, mostly.

Precisely.

As I said before, there's not even much evidence that heat really damages them, but modern drives don't even heat up much, so it's really a non-issue.

tooki