Antec MX-1: Actively Cooled External HDD Enclosure

Want to talk about one of the articles in SPCR? Here's the forum for you.

Erssa
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Post by Erssa » Mon Apr 02, 2007 9:47 am

Erssa wrote:At least one shop in Finland has it listed for 45.80€. So I think 40-50$ might be quite close to the truth.
I have to take that back as it seems to be removed. I can't remember what shop it was, but I can find it with google anymore. But I know at least one other shop has it listed for ~68 euros. That's pretty close to the MRSP Antec gave.

I liked the postscript.

sanse
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Post by sanse » Mon Apr 02, 2007 10:50 am

my desktop at work contains one hdd and that one has been spinning at 46 to 48 c for the past 4 years day in day out and still performs fine.

dhanson865
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Re: POSTSCRIPT — April 2, 2007: IS LOW HDD TEMPERATURE DES

Post by dhanson865 » Mon Apr 02, 2007 10:54 am

Here we go again. I've seen comments/questions about this concept on so many threads since that report came out.

As far as I'm concerned the failures below 30c were just noise in the data or in other words bad data to begin with.

The study wasn't a single variable equation designed to easily find a relationship between drive temp and failure rate.

As seen in viewtopic.php?p=324967&highlight=#324967
we have this quote:
sjoukew wrote:
Disk drive components are generally rated for an operating temperature range of 5 to 55°C. Within these limits, component life is specified to be at least 5 years. If a drive gets too hot, that is beyond its rated temperature range, the components will start to degrade and the danger of the electronics malfunctioning increases.
Source: interview with maxtor at http://www.nextgenelectronics.com/maxto ... view.shtml
In general I believe whiic's comments in viewtopic.php?t=38343 to be correct as he discusses some misconceptions about the Google report.

Personally I am still happy when I see 25c to 35c on my drive temps even after reading the Google study. I would consider 30c to be an ideal drive temp at idle and will endure minimal noise to keep my drive below 40c at load.

Le_Gritche
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Re: POSTSCRIPT — April 2, 2007: IS LOW HDD TEMPERATURE DES

Post by Le_Gritche » Mon Apr 02, 2007 1:18 pm

dhanson865 wrote: As far as I'm concerned the failures below 30c were just noise in the data or in other words bad data to begin with.
Care to explain a bit why failures below 30°C would be noise, but those over 50°C wouldn't, or even why you choose 30°C but not 33°C, 37.2°C, 10*Pi°C or any treshold equally arbitrarily decided ?
These failures are just facts and I thought we were done with excluding data points only because they don't fit someone's preconceived theory.
I would consider 30c to be an ideal drive temp at idle [...]
After ordering that failures below 30°C simply didn't happen (and if they did, well, they won't do it again, I swear), I guess it's not surprising that you can consider 30°C to be the ideal drive temp at idle.

But I guess you don't disagree much with Google's report in the end, because with 30°C idle and close to 40°C at load, the average should be around 33-35°C depending on drive use. That's close to the ideal average temp of 38°C of the graph in Google's report if I recall correctly.

Aside from the other SMART readings analysis, Google's study was important in showing that for HDDs, cooler is not always better : there's a point where you really start to worsen the failure rate of your drive if it runs too cool.

Brian
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Post by Brian » Mon Apr 02, 2007 3:20 pm

The data presented in that paper clearly show a correlation between low hard drive temperature and higher rate of failure. Looking at the error bars tells you it's not a fluke.

Now, it would also be premature to conclude that the low temperature caused the failures. Here's a more likely hypothesis: The servers that had low temperatures also had more fans near the hard drives, which caused airflow and vibration that could have caused hard drive failure.

So while drives cooled to <30°C had problems in Google's server farms, so did hard drives whose average temp was >45°C.

But about Antec MX-1: It seems that it doesn't make your hard drive last longer, nor does it make your hard drive quieter. So what good is it to SPCRers?

jaganath
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Post by jaganath » Mon Apr 02, 2007 4:29 pm

But about Antec MX-1: It seems that it doesn't make your hard drive last longer, nor does it make your hard drive quieter.
Ralf Hutter wrote:Fan noise is too quiet for me to hear at 1 meter. To me, this is exceptional performance and makes the MX-1 worth the price of admission, no matter what other issues it may have.
given that max eSATA length is 2m and sound falls with distance obviously it will make any hard drive quieter.

Brian
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Post by Brian » Mon Apr 02, 2007 5:48 pm

Ah, I seem to have failed to think outside the box on that one. If you could put it in your closet or maybe in some sort of ... enclosure - then it would be pretty useful.

Actually, a simple volt mod on the fan would take care of its needless cooling problem.

Filias Cupio
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Post by Filias Cupio » Mon Apr 02, 2007 9:22 pm

An air-cooled hard-drive enclosure anecdote. (Not really relevant.)

I was part of a small team implementing a new source control system for a medium sized company (~100 developers.) Due to a miscommunication, about a week before go-live the hardware guys had to hurredly buy us a couple of disk drives (disk mirroring/RAID 1) and put them into a spare hard-drive cabinet (which would hold 2 drives and had a fan.) The night before go-live we had to write huge amounts to these drives (~100+ sandboxes). It all went well for some time, then became *really really slow*.

On investigation, we found the hard drives were painful-to-touch hot. The computer was writing briefly, then the drives would cut out for over-heat protection and cool for a while before allowing another brief write.

So we took the lid off the cabinet, got a room fan (~40cm, on a stand), and pointed it at the drives. Disaster averted. (After a few days, the hardware guys fixed it with a suitible cabinet.)

Tzupy
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Post by Tzupy » Tue Apr 03, 2007 3:31 am

IMHO Antec should have included some kind of rpm regulation, so users can adjust the fan speed.
If someone wants his HDD(s) to be cool at 30C, let it run at 100%. I however would prefer to run my HDD between 35-40C.

sanse
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Post by sanse » Tue Apr 03, 2007 8:00 am

i think harddrives are just like cars:

every cold start is bad. the first 5 kilometer during warmup give more wear than the next 5000 at fully operating temp.

dhanson865
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Re: POSTSCRIPT — April 2, 2007: IS LOW HDD TEMPERATURE DES

Post by dhanson865 » Tue Apr 03, 2007 8:27 am

Le_Gritche wrote:
dhanson865 wrote: As far as I'm concerned the failures below 30c were just noise in the data or in other words bad data to begin with.
Care to explain a bit why failures below 30°C would be noise
Did you read ANY of the threads I linked to?
whiic wrote:Some manufacturers have accurate temperature sensors, others have not. Some Samsungs run at temperatures between "10" and "15" in a room temperature of 25.

Apparently they considered temperature values from Hitachi drives spurious and thus disregarded them: "For example,
some drives have reported temperatures that were
hotter than the surface of the sun."


I have commented several times on the unique way Hitachi drives report temperature. All others report temperature in the last byte of raw data field and rest are just zeroes. Because of this, it's easy to convert the whole raw data from binary to decimal and assume to be current temperature.

Hitachi drives report temperature as [zero byte][max temp byte][zero byte][min temp byte][zero byte][current temp byte]. For example: 0x003200120025 is the raw data of Hitachi Travelstar in this laptop I'm using. 0x32 is 50 deg C, 0x12 is 18 deg C and 0x25 is 37 deg C.

SpeedFan knows how to convert Hitachi temperature raw data to real temperature. Software like HDD Health does not. And whatever software Google uses also fits into the latter category.
Rusty075 wrote:I think some of you are overlooking what is the most likely potential explanation for the "cool drives fail faster" phenomenon in the Google report:

The temperature results list average temperature readings for the drives.

Take two identical drives. Place one under continuous Medium utilization where its drive temperature stays at a near constant 45°. Place the other drive under Low utilization, where it spends say 2/3rds of its time idling at 25°, and 1/3rd of its time at 100% use where its temp peaks at over 50°. The Low drive will have an average temp that is much less than the Medium usage drive (33° in my hypothetical). But I could almost guarantee you that the repetitive thermal cycling that comes from alternating periods of high usage and low usage will be harder on that drive than the 12° hotter temp is on the Medium, thus making the Low drive statistically more likely to fail. For many high-precision mechanical parts thermal cycling is more damaging than conventional wear....seems reasonable the HDD's would have a similar reaction.

The "low temperature" drives were more likely drives that were deployed in low demand servers, where they spent large portions of their time at idle, rather than just happening to be in extra-cold rooms or in racks that inexplicably had a bunch of extra fans in them.

A correlating bit of data show up in the Utilization failure chart where in more than half the time periods the drives with Low utilization are more likely to fail than the drives with Medium usage. While their "Survival of the Fittest" is one theory, the effects of thermal cycling could also be playing a part.
whiic wrote:Still, do you disagree with some of the following:
- 5400rpm drives usually run cooler than 7200rpm
- 5400rpm drive are a dying breed and usually use older technology and ball-bearings
- ball-bearings compromise HDD reliability over a longer period of use as ball-bearings have a tendency to wear out (thus increase non-repeatable run out (NRRO) and cause errors during I/O).

If you agree with those three propositions, and remember Google's study did have both 5400rpm and 7200rpm drives, don't you see the possibility of this affecting the statistics?

Some ... claim things like cooling a HDD "too much" will cause reliability to drop. I find it more likely that bearing type is more likely cause. Sure, it wouldn't be a statistical problem to have BB drives among other drives IF there was not correlation between BBs and lower rpms. But there obviously is a correlation, thus it affects the outcome and causes extra failures at low temperatures. Reduce cooling on cool-running BB drives and it certainly won't do any good... except reduce noise produced by fans, but since it's a server that doesn't matter.
Some drives report temps lower than ambient. This is not logical so lets call it a reporting error for those drives. Some drives erroneously report high temps when they are at low temps. Why is it this way? I don't know but I see it all the time. Motherboard sensors that report 70+C case temps at startup when the temp is really in the teens but roll over to 20C when the case starts to warm up. Why design a thermal sensor that will report wildly inaccurate readings? All I know is it happens in this industry and it happens often. Are we saying that the Google data centers are kept below 60F/15C? Do you trust all the temp data your hardware gives you without question?

The drives in the study varied widely. If you wanted to test specifically for the relationship between drive temp and failure rate you should have every variable the same other than drive temp.

I'm not saying the Google study is worthless. I'm just saying I'm taking it with a grain of salt.

smilingcrow
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Post by smilingcrow » Tue Apr 10, 2007 10:22 am

Where does the temperature issue leave 2.5â€

KDJ
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Post by KDJ » Mon May 28, 2007 6:30 am

Great review. I've been in the market for an external enclosure and I believe I shall be purchasing one in the next few days.

It looks great, though I must say I've become a bit fond of Antec products over the years (mostly with their pc cases). It might not look too good next to my white notebook, but it's clearly better than most other external enclosures and it wont be attached to the notebook 24/7 anyway.

elmopuddy
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Post by elmopuddy » Thu May 31, 2007 9:11 am

$57.20 CAD at directcanada.com

Just received mine today, can't wait to play with it tonite :P

elmopuddy
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Post by elmopuddy » Fri Jun 01, 2007 9:40 am

Ok, got mine installed.. 320 Seagate, connected to JMICRON eSata port on my P5B-Deluxe..

Its noisy..not that loud, but louder than my actual machine.. drive seeks are fine, but the fan makes a very annoying noise..

I may return it.. haven't decided yet.

I am moving in a couple weeks, and my PC will be under my desk.. perhaps placed on top of the PC I won't hear it as much.

panda-R
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Post by panda-R » Tue Jun 05, 2007 6:31 am

elmopuddy wrote:Ok, got mine installed.. 320 Seagate, connected to JMICRON eSata port on my P5B-Deluxe..

Its noisy..not that loud, but louder than my actual machine.. drive seeks are fine, but the fan makes a very annoying noise..
i have the exact same setup as you, seagate 320 7200.10 to the eSata port on the P5B-Deluxe... and the enclosure is NOISY! i think theres something wrong with my fan because it's getting worse as the days go by, and it's by FAR the loudest thing near my comp and easily hearable from 3m away.

I really want to keep it because the drive temps are really good, but the fan is unbearable.

Gilbert
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Post by Gilbert » Sun Jul 01, 2007 10:13 pm

Do you guys think the 750GB limit applies to both to USB and eSATA, or only USB? The way I figure it, the eSATA connection is being directly passed through from the drive, 'cause I can't see the point in some sort of SATA controller here.

sheltem
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Post by sheltem » Thu Jul 12, 2007 8:52 am

Has anyone found out if the enclosure spins down the harddrive automatically after a period of inactivity?

tameyer
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MX-1 Noisy

Post by tameyer » Fri Aug 31, 2007 12:17 pm

RE comments on noise by panda-R and elmopuddy

I have a Solo case, the MX-1 sits on top with a Seagate 500gb 7200.10 drive.

It is easily noisier than the rest of my system- not at all acceptable.

I wrote to Antec to see if there were any tech bulletins or other advice on diagnosing or correcting this issue. All I received in reply was a cut-and-paste of their RMA process.

After buying several Antec cases, power supplies, and accessories, I was disappointed to receive such a disinterested reply.

Especially after seeing what Apple can do in terms of an enclosure, it is clear that the market has room for a high-quality, high-concept vendor.

SilentKev
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Post by SilentKev » Fri Aug 31, 2007 5:51 pm

I paid $61 Canadian in Ottawa 2 weeks ago which is equivalent to about $57 US these days. Very quiet for my fileserver's external backup unit.

toNka
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Post by toNka » Wed Nov 07, 2007 9:25 pm

panda-R wrote:
elmopuddy wrote:Ok, got mine installed.. 320 Seagate, connected to JMICRON eSata port on my P5B-Deluxe..

Its noisy..not that loud, but louder than my actual machine.. drive seeks are fine, but the fan makes a very annoying noise..
i have the exact same setup as you, seagate 320 7200.10 to the eSata port on the P5B-Deluxe... and the enclosure is NOISY! i think theres something wrong with my fan because it's getting worse as the days go by, and it's by FAR the loudest thing near my comp and easily hearable from 3m away.

I really want to keep it because the drive temps are really good, but the fan is unbearable.
I have owned 3 of these so far.
I keep returning them because they sound like a motorcycle.
I even tried returning it to a different store hoping they had a better batch, no luck.

ATTENTION ANTEC: YOU NEED TO ADDRESS THIS ISSUE AND ISSUE A RECALL!!!


Until then, I'm going to try running mine with the fan unplugged.

toNka
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Post by toNka » Thu Nov 08, 2007 12:47 am

I unplugged the fan and the idle temps remained the same.
I did some navigating around the folders on the drive, no real changes.
So I decided to run a defrag.
After about 30minutes I achieved 48C.
I plugged the fan back in and it dropped to 31C, took awhile though.
Next test, what temps do I get defraging with the fan on?
But I need some sleep first.

Steve_Y
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Post by Steve_Y » Thu Nov 08, 2007 3:35 pm

Like you I'm very unhappy with the noise produced by the MX-1 and have had no luck getting a quiet replacement.

It's interesting to see that the temperatures aren't extreme when running it without the fan for a while. Maybe it's possible to improve the temperatures you get without the fan running?

Do you think it would be possible to fill the gap between the top of the drive and the MX-1 enclosure's case? Plenty of external drives are cooled by mediocre contact between the drive and the case, maybe that would be good enough?

Another option is slowing down the fan, but I'm not sure how to go about that, or whether the fan would still start at a lower voltage.

Other than the fan noise the MX-1 is a decent enclosure. Unlike some the eSATA cable fits securely, with others a light movement of the cable is enough to disconnect it. Even with one of the better enclosures I've tried, an Akasa Integral P2, the eSATA connector is nowhere near as secure as USB. I'm not sure if this is a flaw in the design of eSATA connectors, or if enclosure manufacturers are neglecting a pretty basic feature, but either way I don't want to risk it disconnecting in the middle of data transfer. That on its own is enough to make me want to keep the MX-1. If only it wasn't so painfully loud...

toNka
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Post by toNka » Thu Nov 08, 2007 5:54 pm

Steve_Y wrote:Another option is slowing down the fan, but I'm not sure how to go about that, or whether the fan would still start at a lower voltage.
I've tried that already.
It just makes the same noise but a little lower and at a slower rate.
I think the only answer is a replacement fan.

jimmyzaas
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Post by jimmyzaas » Fri Nov 09, 2007 1:41 pm

I broke down and bought an Antec MX-1..

I am not happy. The fan is definitely defective.. it does sound like a motorbike and definitely louder than the rest of my system.

I can't get a cash refund from the place I purchased it.. I feel so ripped off!

JoeWPgh
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Post by JoeWPgh » Fri Nov 09, 2007 6:57 pm

For my needs, I'm pretty pleased with this:

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.a ... 6817173043

It could be quieter, but you can turn the fan off independent of of the drive, when the drive is not in use. It's a little buggy, but I'm not sure whether to ascribe the bugs to the unit or the rest of the computer - Hotswapping is iffy. BIOS recognizes the drive. Hitachi disk tools does not. Vista does. The price was $5 cheaper when I got mine. At $34, it's great. At $39? I would have given more thought to the Antec.

Jumper
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Post by Jumper » Fri Nov 30, 2007 10:54 pm

I just bought one and the fan is loud, loud, loud. I won't say louder then the rest of my system (3 TriCools on Low, an HX520, and an 8800GT in a P182b) but the noise *character* is extremely annoying, it reminds me of a sleeve bearing fan right before it dies.

Back to Newegg it goes. I'm pissed; I have to eat return shipping + CA sales tax + 15% restocking fee.

jaganath
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Post by jaganath » Sat Dec 01, 2007 1:14 am

I'm pissed; I have to eat return shipping + CA sales tax + 15% restocking fee.
maybe try and sell it on Ebay instead?

Jumper
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Post by Jumper » Sat Dec 01, 2007 1:03 pm

jaganath wrote:
I'm pissed; I have to eat return shipping + CA sales tax + 15% restocking fee.
maybe try and sell it on Ebay instead?
Yeah, by the time I deal with seller's fees, and all the hassle, not worth it.

I'm tempted to return it directly to Antec to see if they can give me a better one...

But I bet that what happened is they changed fan suppliers, so there are no better ones left.

I was also thinking of trying the 'peel up the label and put a drop of oil in the bearings' trick, but that might make a return difficult.

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