Most of us are well aware of how much heat electronic equipment puts out, what can be less intuitive and harder to balance is the problem of heat from hard drives.
Good organised machine operation, with clearly defined device usages, easy control of units across machines, sites or different customers is the key, therefore enter stage left a nice fat label to hold all the details of the unit.
Except, this label acts as a heat blocker, reducing the surface area of the metallic or foil labelled drive as delivered, reducing the area across which the heat from the unit can dissipate, and even causing uneven heating, or heat wearing over time.
The net result... For my project, a high mechanical drive mortality rate, which I simply could not explain, nor model or explain in the man lab.
Only a trip to see how these machines were being employed sufficed to show the problem, label after label applied and reapplied, a drive on within a machine was untouchable it got so hot. My solution, put a number on the drive in marker pen and link that number to a database entry with all the drive information.
This solved the heat death problem.
But it also opened up the scope of the information being transmitted, with access to any smart phone the customer could then look up the information, so could their designated engineer, they need never bother me - which is again key to efficient business practice.
Like-wise those not wanting the quite useful information on the harddrive to be public, simply have their information about the drive secured away behind a password on the site, or even more simply not on the site.
Options and solutions, that's how I see this problem benefiting projects going forward... If only we'd not been putting label after label on for year after year.
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