[rescue] New harddrive in a SS20

[Jeffrey J.Nonken]

On Wed, 29 Jan 2003 23:16:36 -0500, Kevin <kevin at mpcf.com> wrote:

> Under normal circumstances the cdrom/floppy combo has a little
> fan positioned in the back that blows onto the hard drives.
> Is this piece still present?  If not it couldn't hurt to add
> one.  I have one 10k rpm drive and two SM81s in my SS20 and
> even with the fan it gets plenty hot.

Hmm. I thought I'd found that piece as an add-on part, not a standard part.
One of the boxes has it, the other does not. Given the kludginess of the
mounting and power supply, I'd assume it was an add-on even if I hadn't
(IIRC)
seen it as an option on the Sun web site. Perhaps it was shipped standard
with
the SS20 later in the product's life. I guarantee it wasn't there in the
original design. If it was, an engineer needs to be take out and shot. (Or
perhaps he already has been.)

Perhaps this is just my PC experience showing -- which is why I asked this in
the first place, mind you, I'm trying not to assume my PC experience is
definitive -- but my inclination is to try to move the heat out of the box
entirely, not just move the hot air around inside the box. My gut feeling is
that running the drives hot isn't doing them any favors, and keeping the heat
trapped inside the box isn't doing any favors for the rest of the delicate
electronic components in there.

But I've never owned a Sun box before, so maybe I'm over-reacting to a normal
condition.

What I've got in the fanless box right now is one or two (depending on what
I'm doing at the time) 2.1gb Barracuda drives. I don't have the model numbers
at hand. I'm figuring to run this box as a firewall, so one of the 2.1gb
drives should suffice for normal operation. I occasionally put another drive
in there to clone the first one before I try anything stupid. which so far
has
been almost everything I've tried. But it saves re-installing from scratch.
Again.

---
It's ok, I'm just *outside* of Philadelphia.