What is the optimal temperature for hard drives?

Question

Human cells have a range, so computers have to also. The temperature I'm looking for is the widest, but with reason. When the hard drive is too cool, it won't boot. Like everthing else, when it gets to hot, it can get damaged. By the way, what would be a good thermometer-type appatus to read a computers temperature?

Answer 1

Google’s Disk Failure Experience
http://storagemojo.com/?p=378
February 19th, 2007 by Robin Harris in SOHO/SMB, Enterprise, Clusters

Google released a fascinating research paper titled Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population (pdf) at this years File and Storage Technologies (FAST ’07) conference. Google collected data on a population of 100,000 disk drives, analyzed it, and wrote it up for our delectation.


Sudden heat death?

One of the most intriguing findings is the relationship between drive temperature and drive mortality. The Google team took temperature readings from SMART records every few minutes for the nine-month period. As the figure here shows, failure rates do not increase when the average temperature increases. At very high temperatures there is a negative effect, but even that is slight. Here’s the graph from the paper:

See web page for graph
http://storagemojo.com/?p=378


How smart is SMART?
Not very, as Google found, and many in the industry already knew. SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) captures drive error data to predict failure far enough in advance so you can back up. Yet SMART focuses on mechanical failures, while a good deal of a disk drive is electronic, so SMART misses many sudden drive failure modes, like power component failure. The Google team found that 36% of the failed drives did not exhibit a single SMART-monitored failure. They concluded that SMART data is almost useless for predicting the failure of a single drive.

Over work = early death?
A teenager might want you to believe that, but the Googlers found little correlation between disk workload and failure rates. Since most of us, including enterprise IT folks, have no idea how much “work” our drives do, utilization is a slippery concept. The authors defined it in terms of weekly average of read/write bandwidth per drive and adjusted for the fact that newer drives have more bandwidth than older drives.

Answer 2

Optimal Hard Drive Temperature

Answer 3

room temperature is best for hard drives which have electronic and mechanical components. most modern drives support a wide range of operating temperatures and they have a mechnism built in to adjust to environmental conditions. the manufacturer's website may state the operating temperature for your hard drive.

since modern hard drives have better thermal management, hard drive coolers are no longer recommended. as long as the airflow inside the computer case is sufficient, the warm air given off by hard drives, cpu's, graphic cards, even memory and chipsets, will be pulled out of the case and fresh air will be pulled in.

Many motherboards (esp Intel) have on-board monitoring of temperature and voltages. you install an SMB bus driver and monitoring application to see what is going on with the most important components that are most easily damaged by heat (CPU, chipset, graphics processing unit). Hard drive temperature monitoring is typically not needed. Of course, you can buy thermo couples and case monitoring equipment if you like.

By the way, the most important protocol for monitoring hard drive health is S.M.A.R.T. Many hard drive vendors have a free application that monitors SMART parameters. The intel motherboards have Active Monitor (it has a new name now) for monitoring all the board level parameters including SMART.

Answer 4

Here's the spec from just one drive. You'll have to look up each drive's specs. Make sure you meet all of them to ensure your drive has maximum operating life:

ENVIRONMENT
Ambient Temperature
Operating 5 to 55 degrees C
Nonoperating -40 to 70 degrees C
Maximum operating temperature change 20 degrees C per hour
Maximum nonoperating temperature change 30 degrees C per hour
Maximum operating case temperature 65 degrees C
Relative Humidity
Operating 5 to 90 %
Nonoperating 5 to 95 %
Maximum allowable humidity change 30 % per hour
Altitude
Operating altitude (min) -304.8 meters (-1,000 feet)
Operating altitude (max) 3,048 meters (10,000 feet)
Nonoperating altitude (min) -304.8 meters (-1,000 feet)
Nonoperating altitude (max) 12,192 meters (40,000 feet)

All this said, the best temp is a standard air conditioned room at a steady temperture and humidity!

Answer 5

My two hard disks operate at about 35 - 40*C. They are a 2TB WD Caviar Green 5,900RPM and a Maxtor DiamondMax 21 7,200RPM btw