Heatstroke warning for older Acorn kit By Chris Williams. Published: 21st Jun 2005, 23:43:00 | Permalink | PrintableDiscKnight developer says hard discs in RiscPCs could melt The author of disc recovery tool DiscKnight has warned that the UK's soaring temperatures are likely to finish off old hard discs. Aging Acorn kit, such as RiscPCs, with hard discs older than 5 years are highly susceptible to failure, says the ARM Club's David Ruck.
"Every year as soon as we get the first hot days of summer, I get a large number of reports of drive failures," said Dave, who claims multi-slice RiscPCs especially have "quite poor cooling". For the cynics, Dave's recent warning over heat based failures isn't to scare people into getting DiscKnight, which is useless for a melted drive. He explained, "DiscKnight cannot recover any data from drives which have failed completely."
Hard discs tend to tolerate temperatures in the range of 40°C to 50°C. To avoid loss of files, it's recommended that people replace tired old discs and take regular back ups. Some users can fit their important data onto a writable CD or DVD, although others may need a removable hard disc to back up large amounts of data. Dave says he uses a caddy system from CJE Micros and DirSync to back up 20GB of files at a time. He suspects, however, that the additional circuitry involved is affecting the IDE bus in his Iyonix, which occasionally reports temporary disc errors.
Dave told us, "The air coming out of the Iyonix feels quite cool, and it's certainly never needed to use the fan at high speed so far.
"My RiscPC on the other hand did get hot, you could feel the heat through the bottom of the case where the main hard drive lives. It didn't help that it's a 3 slicer with 3 main hard discs, a Syquest drive, PC processor, a CD reader, a CD Writer, 4 podules, 3 IDE bus cables and 1 SCSI bus cable. So that single fan in the PSU isn't going to cool everything."
Links
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