You may remember, a few months ago, I went on a hunt for ways to quiet my computer down. I never achieved the silence I wanted... but now I've had to backtrack.... It all started a few weeks ago when I rediscovered SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) disk monitoring... Wayne's world style flashback.
I installed smartd on all of the perl.org boxes, because we like to know what's going on. Everything looked peachy.. no errors.. and everything was at a nice 21 degrees Celsius.
Since I installed it in the data-center, I had to install it at home too.. and that's where the fun started. One of my drives at home was reporting a bunch of errors and a toasty 47C. Oy! Double what the other machines had. The fan was pushing hot air out the back of the machine. Not good!
Return to the present.
Today, I've replaced my super-quiet fan with a louder, more powerful one, seperated my hard disks, so they were no longer pressed against each other. The SMART reported temperature has dropped to 41C, which still seems high to me. It's possible that that's actually 2x the temperature. SMART is funny that way. Or, maybe my fans aren't doing what they wanted.
Needless to say, I'm worried about my disks failing. Time to start planning the "next generation" disk setup. It's gonna be RAID0.. and hopefully it'll be quiet. Maybe external SATA enclosures will be ready.
Time for the Simpsons!
