Will too many Hard drives be a fire hazard shorten lifespan?

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Comixbooks

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Jun 7, 2008
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I never had more then 3 Hard drives at once on a PC but now I have 5 using all my Sata ports on my board one is used for the disk drive.

Can this shorten the lifespan of the motherboard or power supply I know hard drives dont' use much power especially SSDs.
 
Your sig didn't list rig specs.

What hardware are you running?

Either way mech drives and SSDs sip power.
 
most of the time your hard drives won't even be spinning. They will all spin up at start up which could be a problem if you have a huge number of spinning drives. I thinking you would need something like 10-20 though and you would just stagger the start up. The heat isn't a big deal either. Nothing like CPU or GPU.
 
Right now I have 2 SSDs and 3 HHDs just the wiring is nuts! I suppose it would look better in a full tower I have a mid.
 
I have 30 drives coupled with an old 1366 socket board and 2 corsair hx1000 (well it would do with just 1 tbh but using it for backup) for a while and it has been working well, didn't even need that much but had the psu from an "old" gaming pc and that's how it all started.

That's with proper cooling obviously :).
 
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^ this
if the drives are packed close to each other without good ventilation, expect overheating.
If they are cooled well, you wont get many issues.
All my drives have a fan blowing over them, they only exceed 30C in the summer (drives never powered off).

fwiw, I found that my drives fail less when left running permanently on, power saving turned off. (my pc is on 24/7)
But if your drives rarely power up, it might be preferable to use power saving.
If they power up often, lots of heat cycling can harm them earlier in my experience.
 
silk186 said:
most of the time your hard drives won't even be spinning....
Click to expand...

You sure? My FreeNAS server that has 10 drives and all of them spinning all the time when I run torrent 24/7 and keep download files in the pool. And yes, give some fans to make it cool.
 
Fire Hazard, WTF?

ROFL

Drives will have shut down along with rest of system long before ignition temps are reached.

Cheap Yumcha PSU full of dust is another thing though and has nothing to do with drive count.
 
The CPU and any high-powered graphics card will wear out your PSU much more than even 10 hard drives will.

Fire isn't a hazard unless you have a stupid plastic case (as opposed to a smart plastic case) or a window in the case, and the inside isn't lit with cold cathode lighting that isn't UL or CSA safety approved. Still you should be fine if the case is made of steel and the back of it is kept away from curtains. When it comes to plastics, you want the fire resistant kind, that is, stuff certified UL 94 V-0, although noncertified Bakelite is considered real safe, and apparently polycarbonate is also pretty good.
 
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