[SOLVED] Is having multiple hard drives in your system a bad idea?

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tgiacomo

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I have (1) WD Black- 1 TB and (5) 1 TB Velociraptor drives in my system, I do not raid them and I use 5 of them for storage and one of them for Operating system.

OS is on one of the velociraptor drives and the rest of them used just to store things.

On another forum 2 different people stated it was very bad to have all these HD's in a computer is this true? This is what they said below:

"Having 5 WD VelociRaptor drives in the same rig is somewhat risky. Those drives are high-performance 10k rpm that produce quite a lot of heat and vibrations and are not recommended to be used in RAID arrays or larger drive pools like that. This may lead to higher failure rates. The heat is not the only problem. Having so many drives in a single case may cause problems from the vibrations".

As far as heat every time I check the heat temps coming from these hard drives I only see them at and around 29c to 37 c never seen them higher than that.













 
Solution
Math Geek
i don't think it is unsafe. i have had 5 or more drives in a pc myself on a few occasions with no problem. so long as they are getting air and staying cool, then there should be no issue.

not exactly sure what gloom and doom the poster of that comment is expecting but i can't think of anything bad that can happen. a drive may fail but they don't like explode or anything like that. they just stop working....
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Math Geek

Math Geek

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i don't think it is unsafe. i have had 5 or more drives in a pc myself on a few occasions with no problem. so long as they are getting air and staying cool, then there should be no issue.

not exactly sure what gloom and doom the poster of that comment is expecting but i can't think of anything bad that can happen. a drive may fail but they don't like explode or anything like that. they just stop working....
 
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Solution
Unkk

Unkk

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As long as you have good ventilation over them and a quality power supply you will be fine. Under voltage or low amps will kill hard drives.
I would recommend backing them up on a regular basis though... habit
 
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SchizTech

SchizTech

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Ordinarily it's not a problem. I have three 7200RPM HDD for storage with an SSD as OS drive. As the quote says, those WD Raptors aren't common drives, being 10,000RPM drives. Having so many of those in one desktop is uncommon.

As a general rule, redundancy is key to data safety. If you have good backups which are maintained, whether local or cloud, the risk of losing data is mitigated even if drives fail.
 
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cosmoji

cosmoji

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i agree, i see no reason to worry beyond making sure nothing is overheating. which i doubt is an issue. you'll find that, as with any technical hobby, some people get very paranoid about computers. its not that this is a known issue and nobody seems to listen, its more that they're making a mountain out of a molehill over a hypothetical perfect storm of situations.

notice the "may" condition they use. yes, heat or vibration MAY contribute to a failure, but to be fair another compoents failing and causing a power spike or a sudden meteor strike or crazy person who breaks in to people houses just to set computers on fire MAY also lead to their downfall.

 
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Eximo

Eximo

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Single point of failure if the power supply goes thermonuclear. Data centers have racks and racks of drives all running in a single chassis. Not really all that uncommon.

I can kind of see where they are going with the vibrations, but the drives are self adjusting and it would take some serious harmonics to cause a head crash or wear out a bearing prematurely.
 
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