Hard Drive Temperatures: Be Afraid

Hi Jeff. Have you considered adding passive heat sinks to your hard drives to work as a backup in the event of a case fan failure?

Don’t rely on some large MTBF to mean your disk won’t fail…

Maybe I’m just unlucky, but in my approximately 18 years of PC ownership, I’ve had at least 4-5 disks fail, 3 of which were sudden and catastrophic. (ie: no advance warning; they worked fine one night, but never spun up again after I came back the next day, so 0% data recoverable). Two of those dead disks were in an extremely well-ventilated case.

Another utility to use is HDD Health from Panterasoft (http://www.panterasoft.com/). It’ll notify you if your disk temperature goes over 45 degrees, IIRC, and lets you look at your other disk stats. My only complaint with it is that if I’m doing something I/O intensive on my laptop, when the temp hits 46 degrees, it’ll pop up a new message box every 10 seconds or so. That can add up to a lot of little messageboxes.

The last system I put together, I mounted my hard drives externally. That keeps them out of the heat and dust. The drives aren’t any slower (I don’t mount them on the USB bus) and they last much longer.

DTemp is excellent - thanks for the info. Do you guys know of any similar software that does CPU temperature monitoring? Thanks in advance.

I bought a NAS system recently and had to install the disk myself. It came with sticky bits of foil to connect the HD case to the NAS housing. I assumed this was somekind of static/earthing strategy. However, the same idea could potentially be used to conduct heat to the case without transferring any vibration/noise.

Regarding heat dissipation with sticky foil bits, heat is not electricity. What counts in dissipating heat is the total surface area that can radiate heat into the air. For heat reduction to work effectively, you need a large surface area or a “fin” surface which acts the same way.

Great post Jeff! I recently upgraded my PC case to an Antec nine hundred which has two 120 mils right in front of a very generously spaced apart 3 drive cage (for each fan) There’s about a half inch gap between each drive… brought my WD Raptors’ temps down from 50C to a cool 30C. Also in response to the question about a good monitoring tool for CPU and HD temps I use SpeedFan (www.almico.com/speedfan.php) it’s a little rough looking but it has terrific customizability… it can’t see through my RAID setups but for single drives it can give a complete S.M.A.R.T. report that gives the user a good illustration of the drive’s health. Oh yeah, and it also reports the RPM’s of the motherboard connected fans (CPU, NB, and PSU–if you’ve got 'em)

Nice point, I think I’ll check out my hard drive enclosure for air flow.

Just one thing: “But unlike your CPU, they’re generating a lot of mechanical movement, which means friction-- and heat disproportionate to the power input.”

As far as I know, the laws of thermodynamics (in the case of a PC or other home electronics) only really allows for energy in having a direct correlation to heat out.

I don’t think it matters if the energy is being used as a heater (coil of wires), a hard disk full of friction, a CPU, a keyboard or a monitor, each watt in will always produce the EXACT same amount of heat (unless there is some other energy product created)

This is why small electronic heaters NEVER have efficiency ratings–they are just as efficient as a lightbulb, tv, fan or computer at generating heat (100% efficient)

My hard-drive’s tempreture hovers around 23- 24 C. I was surprised since I expected it to be warmer.

This is probably the first blog I ever found useful information on. And now it’s part of the daily things I like to read now.

“My hard-drive’s tempreture hovers around 23- 24 C. I was surprised since I expected it to be warmer.”

Impossible. Either your hard drive sensor is not working right or you use extreme cooling like airco or water cooling. Most drives in general run 8-10 degrees higher than ambient room temperature and that is with front fans blowing. In your case that would mean that you’re in a room with of 12-14 degrees. Nice try though LOL

… that you’re in a room with of 12-14 degrees. Nice try though LOL

“Two of those drives were in an extremely well ventilated case.”

Well ventialted means nothing if your ambient temperatures are pretty high all year. Also that you lost your drives doesn’t mean it was because of problems related to temperatures. If you’re one of those amateurs who has a PC on the floor and kick it with his feet by accident a few times a year, then you’re asking for trouble. Also buying crappy brands doesn’t help either.

"Manufacturers measure off quite a modest range of operating temperatures for hard drives, from +5 to +55C as a rule, and occasionally to +60C. This operating range is much lower than processors, video cards, or chipsets. Moreover, hard drive reliability depends heavily on their operating temperatures. According to our research, increasing HDD temperature by 5C has the same effect on reliability as switching from 10% to 100% HDD workload. Each one-degree drop of HDD temperature is equivalent to a 10% increase of HDD service life. "

Everybody can come up with numbers like this. The only time these numbers are useful is if they’re backed up with facts. Where are your facts?

I just got a new Seagate 7200.10 HDD that’s running at 46 C. There is a fan in the front of the cabinet blowing air right on top of it. The CPU temp is only 38 C. Is the temp safe considering the room temperature is about 27 C?

Have a look at the temp yourself
http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/2185/tempig7.jpg

Does it feel like it’s running at 46c? Does your finger confirm what the measurements say? It is possible for the software to be wrong, eg, it’s reading the hardware temp sensors incorrectly, or it’s reading the wrong ones, etc.

When in doubt, always make sure direct observation confirms what the software tells you. I own an infrared temp gun I use on occasions like this…

On my Acer T135 w/ a WD 160 hard drive, I get readings from 54-58C, using both DTemp and SpeedFan (the readings match). However, the outside of the hard drive does not feel hot to the touch. What is your opinion of this? Should I be concerned? Thanks!

“Impossible. Either your hard drive sensor is not working right or you use extreme cooling like airco or water cooling. Most drives in general run 8-10 degrees higher than ambient room temperature and that is with front fans blowing. In your case that would mean that you’re in a room with of 12-14 degrees. Nice try though LOL”

Well I dont know what to say then 'cause that’s what the proggy said.

HDTune is a nice and simple application for this purpose as well. Check hdtune.com