[sdiy] "Boutique" capacitors

[Roy J. Tellason]

On Saturday 05 February 2005 04:25 pm, Scott Gravenhorst wrote:

> >Yeah, it's been my experience that you're far more likely to lose a hard
> >drive in that timeframe than a motherboard. Consumer-level hard drives
> >these days generally only have a 1year warranty and their lifespan when on
> >24/7 tends to only last marginally longer than that.
>
> That's not been my experience.

Nor mine.

> I don't purchase high end drives either.

I couldn't afford to.

> Disk drives on my LAN are retired for being too small, not for failing.

You planning on retiring any,  let me know off-list.  :-)

> All are operated 24x7, I turn off the power management crapola.

Likewise.

>I have some 15 or so drives that are all operating 24x7, for years.

I only have 7 or 8 running at the moment,  but there's a server of sorts in 
process.

> Maybe I'm just lucky?

Are we talking air-conditioned where that stuff runs?

> There were a few models released a several years ago, that failed early. 
> The Quantum Fireball was one IIRC.

That one that did fail that I mentioned was marked as an IBM drive,  but guess 
who made it?  :-)

> Fans are my biggest problem.  *Those* things are made of crap.

I have one in the server here that started "pulsating" on me a while back.  It 
seems that even those fans that are sold as "ball bearing" are only ball 
bearing on one side,  but still sleeve-bearing on the other.

I managed to peel back (with an x-acto knife) the paper label on the one side,  
and a drop of oil in there has worked wonders.  That was oh,  a year or so 
back it had the problem?  Still running fine...

Most people don't know that you can do that.  Sometimes (in some stuff here) 
there's a smallish plastic "plug" under the label that covers the end of the 
shaft.  Same tool mentioned up there can be used to "pry" it out of the hole 
that it sits in,  and the oiling becomes much more effective than trying to 
get it in between the plug and the hole.