[Beowulf] Cooling vs HW replacement

[Karen Shaeffer]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2005 at 09:30:03AM -0700, Josip Loncaric wrote:
> At my old job, we had the unfortunate experience of AC failing on the 
> hottest days of the year.  Despite providing plenty of circulating fresh 
> 35-40 deg. C air, we lost hardware, mainly disks.  In fact, we'd start 
> losing hard drives (even high quality SCSI drives in our servers) any 
> time the ambient temperature approached 30 deg. C.

Hello,

I would certainly agree with the assertion that disk drive MTBF has
a strong, nonlinear dependency on operating temperature. While I have
not run disks at out of spec temperatures, I did work at Seagate for a
few years, where I learned of this very strong dependence. This thread
began with the assertion that you do not need to cool disks, but I 
think this is a very ill-advised strategy.

YMMV,
Karen
-- 
 Karen Shaeffer
 Neuralscape, Palo Alto, Ca. 94306
 shaeffer at neuralscape.com  http://www.neuralscape.com