Leica ASMDW

[Chris Guerin]

Hi everyone:

        We have been having ongoing problems with hard drive failures in our Leica ASMDW time lapse workstation connected (we think) to excessive heat buildup in the cabinet containing the computer and other hardware. Can anyone else comment either on or off list about whether our situation is unique or if others have seen this happen. Experienced users with solutions to this problem would be especially welcome.

Many thanks,

Chris Guerin
Leader Microscopy Core
Department for Molecular Biomedical Research
Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB)
Gent, Belgium

[Tao Tong]

For mission-critical time-lapse experiment, never put the computer hardware in a poorly ventilated cabinet. Ensure the computer area is well ventilated, but with sufficient thermal and mechanical isolation from the microscopes and live chamber. We adopt a SAN (Storage Area Network) solution, all the data storage is online, for easy management and data integrity, totally eliminated local hard drive reliability issue.

If you do need to storage the data locally, make sure to use RAID disk array to ensure data integrity, and ensure sufficient ventilation.

Good luck.

Tao

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 11:18 AM, Chris Guerin <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi everyone:

       We have been having ongoing problems with hard drive failures in our Leica ASMDW time lapse workstation connected (we think) to excessive heat buildup in the cabinet containing the computer and other hardware. Can anyone else comment either on or off list about whether our situation is unique or if others have seen this happen. Experienced users with solutions to this problem would be especially welcome.

Many thanks,

Chris Guerin
Leader Microscopy Core
Department for Molecular Biomedical Research
Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB)
Gent, Belgium

--
http://tongtao.com

[Straatman, Kees (Dr.)]

Dear Chris,

We had the same problem on a different confocal system where the cooling fan in the computer had failed, causing the system to overheat and crash. If I remember it well they had to replace the mother board to solve the problem. However, our computer is not in a special cabinet but just next to the microscope.

Kees


Dr K.R. Straatman
Senior Experimental Officer
College of Medicine, Biological Sciences and Psychology
http://www.le.ac.uk/biochem/microscopy/home.html


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-----Original Message-----
From: Confocal Microscopy List [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Chris Guerin
Sent: 30 November 2009 16:18
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Leica ASMDW

Hi everyone:

        We have been having ongoing problems with hard drive failures in our Leica ASMDW time lapse workstation connected (we think) to excessive heat buildup in the cabinet containing the computer and other hardware. Can anyone else comment either on or off list about whether our situation is unique or if others have seen this happen. Experienced users with solutions to this problem would be especially welcome.

Many thanks,

Chris Guerin
Leader Microscopy Core
Department for Molecular Biomedical Research
Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB)
Gent, Belgium