P180 - hard drives crashing?

W

walkman

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 20, 2008
Messages
267
I've had a P180 case for a number of years because I like a quiet computer.

But, I just had another hard drive crash. A 1.5 TB WD green. I think this is the 3rd HD to fail in this case.

Could it be because I'm not getting enough air flow to keep the drives cool? I'm thinking of changing to a P183 which changes the fan placement to 'blow' air over the HD's instead of a fan that designed to 'pull' air.

The 4 HD' are in a vertical orientation, which I think shouldn't matter.

Finally, shouldn't I get SMART warnings about the drive failures before they happen? I have SMART turned on in the BIOS.
 
The P180 has plenty of airflow, at least where HDDs are concerned. I would chalk it up to either 'bad luck' or another factor unrelated to temperature (bad PSU?).

HDDs aren't nearly as temperature sensitive as you might think and in fact are designed to run optimally in a fairly warm thermal zone.
 
What are you running for fans?

I use a P180 with 5 mechanical HDs + SSD and have never had a HD failure in this case.

I used to have bad luck with WD so I switched to Samsung.
 
I've heard larger drives have a higher failure rate
 
I've been running the stock fan in the bottom chamber with the HD's.

But since that fan blows towards the PSU, I wonder if it could be creating some kind of turbulance that prevents air from being pulled properly across the HD's. I assume that's why the case design was changed for p182/183.

I think the drives have all been WD. I was lucking this time in that I was using the 1.5 failed drive as an internal backup/temp disk and didn't lose anything.
 
Maybe you could put a temperature sensor by the hard drives.

Or you could get the actual hard drive temps.

Then you would know.
 
walkman said:
Finally, shouldn't I get SMART warnings about the drive failures before they happen? I have SMART turned on in the BIOS.
Click to expand...

SMART warnings rarely work when they're suppose to.

What PSU are you using?

If you still want to change the fan placement, you really don't need to spend the $150 for the P183 just for that. A little metal cutting tool, i.e a dremel, a compound action snip or metal shear, and a thin sized 120mm fan will let you have a 120mm fan up front:
120mm Yate Loon D12SL-12C Case Fan - $5
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top