heat vs. hard drives: an insider's look

flyingsherpa · Post by **flyingsherpa** » Tue Feb 17, 2004 3:42 pm

one of the advantages of being a mechanical engineer from a large school is that you tend to know alums working in lots of different areas. i have a car question, i ask my friends at the Big 3. blah blah you get the point. well i finally got around to asking my friend who works for seagate about heat and hard drives. his answer quoted:

As far as how hot a drive can get, the drives are spec'd to 60C ambient temperature. Extensive reliability testing is done both at 60C and 65C to test for margin to establish that the drive performs well in temperature extremes. I would strongly recommend against operating the drive above 60, as problems will arise, but below that it should work fine and data integrity should not be a problem. That being said, the drive will always operate best at around room temperature. You'll find the same behavior with any hard drive, although I'm not sure if our competitors' testing is as thorough as ours. If you're looking for a compromise between fan speed and drive performance, I'd recommend shooting for about 50C. That should be safe to operate at on a somewhat continual basis. Keep in mind, though, that this number's just my engineering judgement, so I wouldn't base multimillion dollar decisions on it. I'm sure we have hard data on the matter that I could dig up, but that's the sort of thing that's proprietary, sorry.

so thats his story. he's a good friend, but i don't want to badger him about this issue so please don't ask me to ask him 1000 follow-ups. i just thought it would be good food for thought even though there isn't a definitive answer in there.

Pete · Post by **Pete** » Tue Feb 17, 2004 4:10 pm

Interesting. I personally would not want my hdd to hit the 50c mark. At least not on a consistent basis. I'll tweak some fan speeds or do something creative to reduce the heat. But that's just my preference - others may disagree.

al bundy · Post by **al bundy** » Tue Feb 17, 2004 5:47 pm

Thanks for posting that info flyingsherpa. Matches with what I've heard from a Seagate insider as well.

wheredoibegin · Post by **wheredoibegin** » Wed Feb 18, 2004 4:25 am

My HDD runs at 50c consistently, i'm not too worried about it. The spec sheet for my drive reads 60c max, good to have an engineer say that sounds ok, it seems most other people think 50c is too high.
Thanks for sharing that flyingsherpa

tjoff · Post by **tjoff** » Sun Feb 22, 2004 9:37 am

Though can you rely on the temperatures that you get?

wheredoibegin · Post by **wheredoibegin** » Mon Feb 23, 2004 2:48 am

If hard drive manufacturers aren't giving accurate or indeed conservative SMART temperature readings they are shooting themselves in the foot.

tjoff · Post by **tjoff** » Mon Feb 23, 2004 3:55 am

wheredoibegin wrote:If hard drive manufacturers aren't giving accurate or indeed conservative SMART temperature readings they are shooting themselves in the foot.

True.. Though if you look at the CPU temperatures and GPU temperatures among many you notice that they can differ 20 c or something...

On the other hand a hardrive is probably a lot easier to monitor than a CPU. But if you susbend the drive it doesn't cool down as it normally does thus it might result in that some parts of the harddrive gets hotter eventhough the temperature that is reported is the same.

But maybe it's negligible.

wheredoibegin · Post by **wheredoibegin** » Mon Feb 23, 2004 4:25 am

The spec sheet for my 'cuda IV 40gig lists operating temperatures from 0-60c ambient !
Makes 50c intenal sound pretty cool really, you wont see me running it near 60c amb anytime soon, but i think i have some leeway

Grommet mounted was 50c when in use with only the psu for exhaust and its down to 45c when in use solid mounted now.

I think i'll end up decoupled with heatsinks but no fan., it seems like the sweet spot for me.

nutball · Post by **nutball** » Mon Feb 23, 2004 6:28 am

Umm, yeah, what 'where' said

As far as how hot a drive can get, the drives are spec'd to 60C ambient temperature.

wdekler · Post by **wdekler** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 5:14 am

Maybe it would be a good idea to build some thermal throttling system into HDDs just as the P4 has.

I guess that we´ll have to live with SMART monitoring (why isn´t this in Windows?).

To bad that lots of people get defective HDDs without knowing that constant overheating was the cause...