[Soekris] laptop hard drive and heat problems?

[Martin Johnson]

On 31 Dec 2007, at 04:33, Joey Kelly wrote:

> Hi,
>
> What kind of heat problems have been reported when running a 2.5- 
> inch drive
> mounted inside a standard soekris 4801 or 5501 case? What can be  
> done to
> moderate the heat build-up?

Compared to running in a laptop, hopefully the drive ought to run cool  
in a metal Soekris case. But if you're going to run 24*7, then you  
probably want to be running a drive designed for that purpose, as most  
laptop drives spend much of their lives either switched off or spun  
down to save the laptop battery.  Ordinary laptop drives may fail  
prematurely if you use them for a server application.

The only 2.5" drives I've found that are rated for 24*7 use are the  
Hitachi Travelstar E7K100, E5K160 and E5K250 ranges: see http://www.hitachigst.com 
  (Products, Travelstar).  The E7K100 and E5K160 come in SATA or PATA,  
but the E5K250 comes in SATA only.

The E7K100 is a 7200 rpm drive with at up to 100 GB capacity.  I have  
one of these, and it seems to work well.  Unlike a laptop drive, it  
does not keep spinning up and down when it gets idle - it just keeps  
spinning the whole time.  The rationale is that this makes for greater  
stability, but power consumption is still very low.  So it seems like  
a good match for a low-power Soekris server.

I haven't found stock of the E5K160 or E5K250 drives so far, so I  
wonder whether they are really available yet.  Has anyone found stock  
of the 250 GB E5K250 drive?

Hope this helps,

- Martin.