Topic: best solution for multiple internal HD's with no home?

[imgoinmad]

Google had a very good white paper released on drive longetivity on their servers.
Heat generally was not linked to drive failure.

I'd love to see that one, as heat is generally thought of as one of the most common causes of drive failure
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/106839/common_causes_of_hard_drive_failure.html

When I came up with my strategy, I based it on the number of drives I had, the speed at which i was filling drives and the cost involved. If I only had one or 2 drives, it might make sense to do a 3 drive raid setup and just keep them all online at one time...but with nearly 50 drives now (have another 500gb on the way) it would take a great deal of time to make a backup (backup sets notoriously fail), it would be quite a big more costly to do multiple raid setups, not to mention the amount of heat generated (could probably heat my office with 50 drives running), electricity used and most importantly...all the noise...drives spinning, raid enclosure fans, etc.

I fill drives rather rapidly with multitrack audio and video projects. I'm working on an independent film project right now that consumes 40gb of storage...Sure would suck to lose data, but I've been running this strategy for a while and not gotten bit....it's worked out well and the cost is about as economical as you can get.

[imgoinmad]

Stiction is known to cause read/write heads to stick the platters of the hard drive due to the breakdown of lubricants which coat the platters themselves.

In my case my drives don't reach the termperatures which would cause breakdown of the lubricant.  Do drives on the shelves in stores/warehouses suffer from stiction?

[cleantone]

anyone know much about hot swappable setups? It makes sense to me that having one unit that could accept hot swap caddies. Maybe cost effective as well. I'm looking for brand and vendor suggestions. Something WITH a cooling fan would be awesome. Thanks in advance...