External Hard Drive docking station

[Danolo]

So, I bought one of these...

https://www.amazon.ca/Docking-FIDECO-Dual-Bay-External-Function/dp/B07GZHTNLD/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=B07GZHTNLD&qid=1618008169&s=electronics&sr=1-1

I plugged it in, plugged in one of my old hard drives, and turned it on. It recognized the drive right away and I was able to copy, delete, etc. So I plugged in another hard drive and it saw it right away! Success I now have two X 1 TB hard drives that I now can clear out and use for some sort of storage.

 

 

Only one question, the drives get quite hot. I left them plugged in, spinning away, for an hour or more and then happened to touch the top of one of the drives, and it was hot! 

I measured the temp and the hottest spot was on the side at 115 F. I turned off the device and its been cooling down, now down to 103F. I dunno if running a fan at it would help much.

So, I must conclude that this device is not best used as an external hard drive, but rather as a temporary way to access a drive.  That's ok, I've got a couple of other drives to check. So far its paid for itself.

 

[Edge]

 

Temp range 25 - 45 (sorry we went metric a while back) is OK but below 40 probably better.

Not clear how you're measuring but suggest you use Hard Disk Sentinel (available from the Pirates) so that you know what other problems you may have with your disks before they fail.

The docking station should be fine, but I'd only switch it on when you want to use it.

[forcebwithu]

I would recommend an inexpensive USB powered fan to cool down your drives. I bought a few from Lazada (link) to keep my laptops and router cool.

[Danolo]

Yup, good idea... I'll have cobble something together to raise the fan to point to the centre of the drives. See previous photo.

 

[forcebwithu]

2 hours ago, Danolo said:

Yup, good idea... I'll have cobble something together to raise the fan to point to the centre of the drives. See previous photo.

I was thinking you could just place the fan on top of the drives. Should work fine with nothing else between the bottom of the fan and the top of the drive. Or you could lay a couple of old pens across the top of the drives to give a bit of clearance for the bottom of the fan.

[SirL]

This HD enclosure looks good - but how is it powered?  Does it have a separate mains power cable, or does it just receive power via USB from the PC/laptop you have it USB plugged into?  In all the pics of it on your Amazon link, I can't see any sign of a mains power cable or socket.  I'd be impressed if it could power a couple of 3.5in drives from just a USB power source.  In the text there's a reference to 12V power, but it's not clear how that works.

[Garzan]

I'd go along with @Edge in suggesting you just power it up when you are writing data to the drive(s), or reading data from the drive(s) rather than leave them spun up all the time. 

To give another example, my NAS has a configuration setting to spin down the drives when they are not in use. 

You can read your drive temperature with free software like this: https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html

Looking at mine, my desktop HDD is at 39/102 but my NVME M.2 drives are at 61/141 (which seems a bit hot, especially since they are under a heat sink.

 

 

Edited April 11, 2021 by Garzan

[Garzan]

4 minutes ago, Garzan said:

Looking at mine, my desktop HDD is at 39/102 but my NVME M.2 drives are at 61/141 (which seems a bit hot, especially since they are under a heat sink.

Looking at the Samsung spec sheet they are rated 0-70C so even though they look very warm, they are still within rated specs. (And it's not like I could do much to cool them off mounted inside the motherboard like they are.)

[T-T-T]

have you formatted the drive to make them clean ( or where they clean  new drives)  or just slaved it from an old PC , if you just slaved it there may well be software on there or the OS that is left that is trying to pole or talk to something like it was in the PC which is not there any more  , this causes over activity as it is trying to start services or connect to something over and over gain , making it work hard making it very hot .. 

That would be my first point of call if I was looking at the issue .. 

Next I would look at the drives for the docking station see if it was installed correctly and if there is any management software it needs to manage the drives.   Hope this helps 

[Edge]

2 hours ago, Garzan said:

I'd go along with @Edge in suggesting you just power it up when you are writing data to the drive(s), or reading data from the drive(s) rather than leave them spun up all the time. 

To give another example, my NAS has a configuration setting to spin down the drives when they are not in use. 

You can read your drive temperature with free software like this: https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html

Looking at mine, my desktop HDD is at 39/102 but my NVME M.2 drives are at 61/141 (which seems a bit hot, especially since they are under a heat sink.

I used to use those docking stations and often forgot to switch them off.... lost several HDDs too.  

Now I have a 4 x 6 Tb Orico which powers the drives down when not in use. I still turn it off as I have 4 HDDs and 2 SSDs in the tower. It's rare for those to go much over 40C...thought I read that over 50C is damaging but maybe not. I installed extra fans and ducting after the last fails.

HDSentinel tells you a lot more than temperature and gives you time to repair a drive or save the data.

[Ben75]

Some studies have shown failure rates double between 40-45 compared to 35-49 Celsius. I like to keep my drives cool and my NAS has an active cooling fan that kicks in when needed.

But in general drives/sectors will fail at some point and it's more important to make sure your multiple disks are setup so that a disk failure will not result in data loss.

Here's a paper with some research done on failure rates and operating temperature: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf

[Danolo]

I've pretty much given up on the docking station.  I started a library on an old drive and a few days later it was gone. The drive still worked, but..

So, I bit the bullet and bought an external 5TB.

I will now use the docking station only when |I need to test a drive, or something like that.

Thanks to y'all for your help and suggestions.