Re: [tlug] auto-shutdown at certain temp application?

[Godwin Stewart <godwin.stewart@example.com>]

On Sun, 18 Jun 2006 07:47:33 +0900, Micheal E Cooper
<mcooper@example.com> wrote:

> One question: while this would cover CPU temperature, is it safe to
> assume that the ACPI reading will cover a case of overheating hard
> disks? Is it possible that the ACPI could be reading only 50 or 60
> while the hard disks are dangerously over-heating? I know there is no
> definitive answer to this, that it depends on the case (double
> intendre intended), but what do you think?

I think it's a non-problem. If your disks are thrashing so much that
they overheat then you have a more fundamental problem like
insufficient RAM and/or a badly organised partition table. I've never
dug into this but suspect that smartmon provides some kind of interface
to an IDE drive's "health status". I don't know if it's even possible to
know the temperature of a SCSI drive.

> One further question is about the temperature for the shutdown: would
> 75C be the sweet spot, or should it be lower to give consideration to
> things like disks, other components, etc?

Depends on many things, not least of which is the processor itself. I
have a Celeron-341 running at 2.93GHz. The fan is throttled at 70% but
kicks in full blast once the CPU temperature reaches 60°C. Past 80°C
the system shuts down - these settings are in the BIOS, BTW.

The CPU temperature has not yet reached 60°C despite the thrashing I
sometimes give it (try requantizing 7 gigs of MPEG2 video without
breaking a sweat) and the high ambient temperature here in Summer.

Different chips are going to run at different temperatures. From what
I've heard, for example, earlier AMD chips could run veeeeery hot, much
hotter than contemporary Intel chips.

IMO, the thing to do is to watch how your CPU behaves in normal use.
Add a safety margin and call the result your cut-off temperature.

-- 
G. Stewart - godwin.stewart@example.com

Good judgment comes from bad experience, and a lot of that comes from 
bad judgment.

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