This is an excellent blog post, about an often-overlooked subject: Hard drive temps.
I’ve long been a practitioner of active cooling for 7200RPM and above HDs, after I had an incident with a 75GXP, isolated in an uncooled mobile rack, that developed bad sectors once the temps reached 52C or above. Even though the drive is supposedly specced to 55C. This happened on two occasions - it was more than just chance.
I now use a Chieftec (OEM for Antec) full-tower case, with multiple intake cooling fans, one for each 3-unit HD bay. My temps according to DTemp are 18C for my Maxtor PATA, and 21C for my WD SATA HDs. Under load the WDs can reach 30C.
Knock on wood, but I strongly believe that the fact that my HDs last as long as they do (24x7 spinning even), is because I keep them cool, and limit their spindown/spinup cycles.
It sucks that most RAID setups do not passthru the SMART data, so it is impossible to monitor RAID temps or even errors, something that is otherwise very useful for diagnosing HDs.
Well written blog just installed a new silverstone alluminium case with 6 dedicated HD bays with 120 twin fans colling my 4 HD a 250 ,2x120 , and a 40 gig HD.
The temp has dropped to 29C for all 4 as when they were placed in the old pc case often ran at between 45C-55- a big drop.
I have used Everest and Dtemp to monitor under load with equel readings from both. i am very happy with this result.
I am a producer. I have been storing and using hardrives for mass storage for awhile… You Guys Are all right basicly… cause older drives run hotter and are heavy, and new drives are light and run cooler. i have about 30 hard drives from 1998 to now, all full … the older ones run hot and need to be maintained(bad sectors). But i use nortin utilities to fix regularly. It became less of problem when i started watching the temps and adding better fans… the run great at 44c to 49c and not much problems… at 50c i notice lag in info retrieving just slightly…im not to technical so im trying my best… new drives to me just are lighter and run at like 37c to 42c easly with not much fan thought… just 2 fans in this machine , dell dimension 4150(old dusty LOL)and 3 hd’s . 100gb and 2 x 250’s… runs great at 45c regularly …most was 49c. main drive slave run at 35c and 38c regulary… I use Speedfan to monitor this… Peace all and Thanks
I have a 1 1/2 year old Seagate Barracuda 200GB and it makes some noise on start up now, but only when it is cold. By cold, I mean about 50 degrees F in the morning as it is by an outside wall and near a window. If I heat the unit gently for 5 minutes before starting, no sounds and, as usual, never any sounds on start up the rest of the day. Does this mean the drive is going and should I replace ASAP? As fas as fans go, I have 3 so and one is right on it, so over heat is not a problem.
All good info on here, but what do you do when all else fails? I’ve got an (old) WD 80GB which runs happily at 33c, no probs there. But also in the same case I have two WD 250Gb drives, one of which runs at 55c and the other 60c, when i first checked the temps, one of the drives was at 74c! and i felt it cause i thought it had to be wrong, but it was stinking hot. Anyhoo, I rearranged my case, had a slight improvement, but only by a few degrees, so back to modding, and i ripped out all the front garbage around the intake fan, and installed a good quality 12cm fan, still didnt help much, just a few degree’s. So now they both have dedicated hdd cooling fans on them as well, and have at least 7cm’s of space above and below each one. What else can i try to drop the temp of the one that still runs at 59c? Both drives are identicle and purchased at the same time, its interesting to see the temp difference between the two identicle drives (i also swapped their position in the case to see if that changed the results, it didnt one is always at least 5c hotter than the other).
My laptop has been running for a while.
i recently got a HD temp monitor and the highest ive seen it go is 38 degrees celcius
and thats when i left it on my bed on to of the blankets one day.
mind you, theres alot of heat coming from the fan at times…but theres not much noise…just the sound of air coming out of the side of the laptop
well now you guys have really got me worried. I just downloaded Hard Drive Inspector and it shows my Maxtor 7Y250M0 HDD is running at 151 degrees Farenheight!
Should I take the tower in and buy a new case with extra fans installed on the inside?
In answer to Joe’s post, we (work) got 200 Gateway Profile 4’s (all-in-one units, i.e. lousy cooling characteristics). Due to shipping lots, we got 100 w/ WD800’s and 100 w/ Seagate Barracuda 7200 80GB. Failure rate on the WD’s was 20% - failure rate on the Seagates was zero (“0”, goose egg, nada, nil, zilch, zip, etc.) The difference? The Seagates were fluid packed spindle bearings (thats the friction part) and the WD’s weren’t. Also, the Seagates have top AND bottom full length aluminum shields that double as heat spreaders (per Seagate). Seagate may have been the first, but since then (2003)many other drive manufacturers have switched to fluid packed bearing sets.
Having said all that, since I started noticing this, I have bought only the Seagate Barracuda drives (ten so far) for home, and with reasonable cooling, have had no drive failures at home either…
I don’t understand why people say “Oh, I never thought about checking my the temperature of my hard drives”. Geez, guys! You all know that a car engine won’t last long when running too hot all the time, why would a hard drive any different,
It’s like Jeff said, it’s the most important part of your computer. You can replace hardware parts a million times, however if you lose data it’s lost forever unless you have a backup.
Download EVEREST Home Edition v2.20.405 from link above. To check your computer temperatures (i.e CPU, Motherboard, HD), click Computer Sensor. This is a great program that everyone should have on their PC.
I don’t like speedfan; it feels crappy and when you start it it takes 4 seconds before it comes up with any values. When you start the program manually it wouldn’t be so much of a problem, but when you use it in startup it will add 4 seconds to your boot time, which is too long.
Everest is useless too for temperature monitoring, I don’t understand why this person adviced it. Everest is NOT intended to run in the background, it’s not a monitoring program, it’s diagnostics tool.
Oh…and the guy named FXP on Decmber 2006; 70 degrees Fahrenheit is impossible, that’s about 21 degrees celsius which means you’re in a room of 16 degrees celsius. Very doubtful, nobody likes 16c rooms, either you brag or your sensor is failing.
I was searching for “hard drive” and “too hot” when I came across this page. I also found: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070225-8917.html
in which Google claim not to have correlated temperature with failure rate except in extremes.
Which brings us to the reason I was searching: SeaTools reported the temperature of my (failed) drive as 253 C. Do I get a prize? Perhaps some sort of riband glued to a fire extinguisher?
Not strictly on topic, but there’s a lot of rubbish here about the laws of thermodynamics. Yes power in equals power out, but it need not necessarily be heat. Otherwise I could put 70 watts into my hard drive, all of which is converted into heat, AND keep the drive spinning… Free energy for everyone! And no, the kinetic energy need not all be being converted into heat through friction. Otherwise how could I hear the darn thing whirring away? Some of the kinetic energy must be being transmitted out of the case as sound waves (though admittedly not a great proportion. In practice I expect 99% of the electrical power ends up heating the case. I’m just being annoying really.)
Over the past three years, I have bought three external hard drives (two Western Digital, one Maxtor). I connect these hard drives via USB 2.0.
None of the hard drive temperature utilities I have downloaded appear to “see” or “sense” these external hard drives, including the Western Digital I bought a month ago. Do even most of the newer external hard drives fail to include the temperature sensors that newer internal hard drives tend to have?
Is there a utility/software that may allow me to monitor the temperature on one or more of these hard drives?
The data from Google means very little for home and office users, only to those running servers that (like googles’) run 24/7/365.
A good HD running at, say, 40C idle and 50C load 24/7 will probably last for years, as it will ‘settle’ at those temps. However, subjected to hundreds of ‘cold starts’ a year …
Notice that cars driven by(e.g.) sales-'reps often cover 100’s of thousands of miles and usually still run like new?
For a system powered up and down regularly, the closer to ambient the HD’s run, the more reliable they’ll generally be.
Over the past three years, I have bought three external hard drives (two Western Digital, one Maxtor). I connect these hard drives via USB 2.0.
None of the hard drive temperature utilities I have downloaded appear to “see” or “sense” these external hard drives, including the Western Digital I bought a month ago. Do even most of the newer external hard drives fail to include the temperature sensors that newer internal hard drives tend to have?
Is there a utility/software that may allow me to monitor the temperature on one or more of these hard drives?
There is Hard Drive Inspector utility (www.altrixsoft.com/en/hddinsp) which supports some external USB drives including Western Digital Passport Drives.