I doubt many disks can tolerate sustained seek activity for long. Motor drivers are often too small to dissipate the heat produced when the disks are called on to seek 100% of the time over periods of hours, let alone tens of minutes. That's what I suspect happened to one, at least. That one failed. The second is still failing.
Unless one is using refrigerator-type cooling system for the computer, or similar, or have the whole computer immersed in the non-conductive liquid (like the Cray for example) then the lowest temperature one can achieve for the innards of a computer - and this means the HDDs as well - is the ambient temperature of the environment in which the computer is operating.
21st Century HDDS are made to work at ~60C when operating and ~65C when idle. Now, if one lives in the tropics then the computer is operating at a pretty high ambient temperature to begin with - and one doesn't hear that anyone living in the tropics has to replace their computer or HDD every month or so :-) . But then, I am probably wrong.....as is normal :-) .
**NOT directly related to the post above but within subject/topic: I just want to say that I just got a new ocz vertex 4 128GB drive and during the process of updating the firmware (only works with windows on a dismounted/offline disk ) I discovered that linux/opensuse supports my hardware much much better than windows(won't go into the details). Anyways, after setting up openSUSE on my new ssd it boots up (from grub to end of kde startup ) in under 18 seconds. I am online and browsing the web in 20 SECONDS!!! almost every page I visit finishes loading at max 4 seconds and I just finished building the linux kernel in 6 minutes and 35 seconds (would be under 5 minutes if I overclocked like I usually do ) . this is a fresh installation with only major thing new being the nvidia driver . and if it is slow for anyone,either you need better hardware or something isn't configured right. I understand not everyone is in a position to have a high priced hardware but even the kde live cd boots up to desktop in under 2 minutes. I installed 12.1 on a usb drive the other day and it is at least as fast as windows 7 on the majority of computers I see everyday as part of my job. I have heard people complain that openSUSE is slow and I just want to clear up that if it is setup right and you are running a modern PC with openSUSE supported hardware then it *shouldn't* be slow at all. -Cheers Michael -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org