On Fri, 23 Jun 2006, Molle Bestefich wrote:

I'd watch out regarding the Western Digital disks, apparently they
have a bad habit of turning themselves off when used in RAID mode, for
some reason:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.device-mapper.devel/1980/

Where "for some reason" == HEAT.  I've seen Maxtor, Seagate, AND Western
Digital drives all shutdown when they get too hot -- so hot you cannot
touch them.  I know this all too well because Dell is stupid or lazy
to design their cases with proper ventilation over the drives; one drive
simply gets hot, two drives get hot enough to discolor their plastic
drive sleds.

Unless you're talking about little laptop drives, hard drives need active
cooling.  A few CFM is usually enough.  A LOT of people underestimate
the cooling needs of their drives. (and sadly that includes far too many
manufacturers of IDE/SATA drive cages.)

--Ricky