Internal rack, outside enclosures or other solutions for backup ?

Clairvaux · 03 Aug 2017

Lady Fitzgerald said:

The dual hot swap bay I linked comes with two self adhesive plastic sheets that are intended to be applied to the PCB of HDDs to ensure the PSBs do not short to the metal bottom of each hot swap bay. I feel that is a bass ackwards approach and I feel it would have made more since to have such a sheet permanently attached to the bottom of the each bay instead. To accomplish that, I used some el cheapo clear plastic LCD screen protector sheets on those metal bottoms.

That's one more problem I had not thought of. No rack manufacturer mentions plastic protectors. These trays are made of metal, and you're supposed to screw the disks on them. One of them has a recess in the center, but part of the disk's PCB at least will be flush with the metal, won't it ?

I just checked with my present enclosures, and the disk PCB lays bare against the metal (as far as I can see). So ? Is it a problem, or not ? Whoever decided in the first place that hard disks would have an exposed PCB has a lot of explaining to do. That's a silly design if I ever saw one !

Lady Fitzgerald · 03 Aug 2017

Clairvaux said:

That's one more problem I had not thought of. No rack manufacturer mentions plastic protectors. These trays are made of metal, and you're supposed to screw the disks on them. One of them has a recess in the center, but part of the disk's PCB at least will be flush with the metal, won't it ?

I just checked with my present enclosures, and the disk PCB lays bare against the metal (as far as I can see). So ? Is it a problem, or not ? Whoever decided in the first place that hard disks would have an exposed PCB has a lot of explaining to do. That's a silly design if I ever saw one !

You're just full of good questions, aren't you? Seriously, this is a good question. Thank you for asking it!

HDDs have an insulating coating on the exposed PCB traces. Trays have the drive screwed into place so there is no friction to wear out the coating when inserting and ejecting the tray. With trayless bays that have a metal bottom that contacts the PCB, however, the PCB on the bottom of the HDD will be subject to friction from repeated insertions and ejections which would probably wear off that insulating coating sooner or later. I've seen other trayless hot swap bays and enclosures that also provide that plastic protector and you can buy the protectors on eBay.

I'm glad you brought this up since I never thought about the coating on the PCB needing protection from friction so it actually does make sense to apply the film to the HDD instead of the bottom of the of the shot swap bay. While it's highly unlikely that I will ever use my few remaining 2.5" HDDs in anything other than the dual hot swap bay I linked earlier, I'm going to remove the film I put inside the bays and apply film to the HDDs themselves so I won't wear off the insulating coating from the PCB on the chance I may decide to sell or give away those drives (fortunately, I have plenty of the sheets for the three remaining 2.5" HDDs I have).

Also, it wouldn't hurt to put some kind of film on a tray where it makes contact with the PCB. Almost any kind of thin, clear tape would work.

Clairvaux · 10 Aug 2017

Well, thanks for answering them !... and letting me know about those hdd protectors I did not even know existed. And sorry about being late to acknowledge your answer. Microsoft Outlook.com ate the email alert.

Purely by chance, I just came across a commenter on Ghacks.net, saying MS Outlook.com had a bad habit of flagging as spam the emails you were expecting most. So, I logged in the web interface for the first time since a hundred years, just to check, since I always use an email client. Sure enough, that alert was waiting for me in my junk folder, while previous alerts got through correctly. (Because otherwise, it wouldn't be funny.)

So, totally unrelated to the topic but potentially useful to some : don't use Outlook.com as a mail server if you retrieve your mail through a desktop client !