Things are a little slow...so I thought I would ask my dumb question of
the week.
Now that thing are going great. I am closing up cases and tidying up.
Is there any problems with leaving these RAID drives in ATA 133 rated
removable drive bays? I am concerned about heat issues, etc.
The fact that they are in a RAID array is semi-irrellevant. What you need to be concerned about is simply how much heat they produce, which will fairly constant regardless of how they're being used as most of the heat generated by drives comes from tehir spin, not their access patterns. They are likely 7200 RPM drives, which can produce a fair amount of heat. Some removeable enclosure manufacturers used to specifically warn against using 7200 RPM drives in their enclosures because they didn't provide sufficient ventilation, and the plastic trays made better insulators than heatsinks. I'd wager that if the carriers are new-ish, you'll be fine, but it would be wise to keep an eye on them.
As an aside, why are you using the carriers for an ata133 array? They surely can't be hot swapped, and since they are part of an array, the typical use case of switching them around for different OS's, etc seems unlikely. I really like the KISS principle myself, and if you have any concerns about heat, I'd suggest taking them out of the carriers if there isn't a good reason for them to be in them.
Per a how-to on softRAID setup from the web, I have a master RAID drive
and a slave CDRW on IDE 0. For cabling reach this is convenient, less
tortured. I am thinking of putting a slave CD on IDE 1 with the second
master RAID. For lower wear and tear on the burner. This box will be a
workstation.
The conventional wisdom that I have seen, is that the read/write head on a CD-RW is heavier than the dedicated read head on a CD-ROM, and using a CD-ROM for read tasks to reduce wear and tear on the CD-RW is a Good Idea(TM). However, I've yet to see this borne out in reality. I used to always have two optical drives in my machines for duplicating and because dedicated readers were signifcantly faster and cheaper than writers, but the tech has gotten to the point that I just don't bother anymore. The drives now are robust, fast, and cheap. The odds of failure are small and the performance delta is negligable, and if they do fail, it's a rather trivial expense to replace them.
That being said, if you have one just kicking around, I can't think of a compelling reason not to put it in and potentially get some use out of it.
--
-Regards-
-Quentin Hartman-
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