VirtualLarry says his IDE drive runs at 18C, his SATA drives at 21c hehe
Larry my friend, if you try to make up a story then make it look believable…sigh
RE:
“This is pretty funny now that the Google study has come out, which expressly shows no correlation between high hard drive temperature and failure rate.”
Good bit of fear mongering though.
Michael Goldberg on March 5, 2008 09:06 PM
Yeah I just found that pdf last night and was thinking the exact same thing. Know the facts before assuming! 100,000 drives in a study (by google at that) can’t very well be wrong! I just adjusting drive temp to 35 - 40 C in hopes of the fountain of drive youth!
i have a dell oem box(didn’t have time to build myself)…
the way that dell stacked their hard drives saves space+easy to remove, but they’re stacked on top of each other…
running 66degC for the OS drive, 40degC for the idle drive…
need to get some fans
Hmmm…interesting…
before we get all crazy here though take a good look at the data:
Point 1: cooler drives actually had a higher failure rate than hotter drives - sorta – real cool drives did in the first 2 years of their life. It seems to show that drive temps much under 35c are not a good idea during the first 2 years of a drives life.
Point 2: However, as a drive ages this does change - look at year 3 - above 45c has almost 3 times the failur rate of 35c - my drives were running over 50c before I started cooling them. Yes I tend to replace my computer every 6 to 8 months (normally more like every 3 months) - but the data drives often stay and go in the new one.
Point 3: Many of the people here were talking about hard drive temps well over 50C - their study does not even show this. However, I can assure you from experience that if you are moving large amounts of data over night and put a fan on your drives you have a much better chance of this acutally working.
Perhaps it is like a car - too hot is bad, however, you do want it to at least reach running temp. In this case that appears to be about 35c.
My thoughts are stay between 33 and 38 if you can. Anything over 45 needs to be looked at and over 50 you are simply asking for trouble.
What does the rest of the group think?
Joe Ruder
Onsite Computer Systems, Inc.
sorry, forgot this part:
“- Good bit of fear mongering though.”
I don’t thnk anybody was fear mongreing here…
Michael, sorry to pick on your post, however - have you had time to actually read the google study? It does not show no correlation between hard drive temp and failure rate. Not even close. It simply shows that their does not appear to be as high as once thought – not to mention again that their study only went up to 50c.
“fear mongering??” – hardly…
i can see the conversation heating up in this blog
In my experience temps do seem to matter.
I had 2 150GB WD Raptors in my initial setup which ran 24/7 at the temps around 50#1057; according to SpeedFan. I didn’t really pay much attention to the temps, not knowing how critical they are. When one of the drives with the OS on started acting up – not defragging properly – I bought and installed a backup, a Hitachi Deskstar 750GB, just in case. Sure enough, the dodgy Raptor failed within a month. Okay, I installed the OS on the second Raptor, and it also failed within two weeks. That made me sit up and take notice. I’d never had HDs fail on me before, much less two in a row and after only 1.5 years of service. So I did some research online and the consensus seemds to be HD temps should not exceed 40#1057;, which seems to be vindicated by my experience. So I bought another 750GB Deskstar, as a backup to the former backup, installed additional fans to run the HDs at 35#1057; and look forward to prolonging their live to significantly longer than 1.5 years. So basically my experience runs contrary to Google’s findings and I intend to keep my drives within the 33-38#1057; temp range.
I agree with the above commenters – the Google study does not refute the hard drive temperature warning. It doesn’t even track temperatures 50c, perhaps under the assumption that such temperatures would be ridiculously high.
There is a causal relationship between heat and hard drive failure, and when it comes to hard drives, do you really want to play “chicken” with all your data?
I wish I could transplant all the misplaced concern over temperatures for inert slabs of silicon (CPU, GPU, Northbridge, etc) into hard drives, where the heat is far FAR more dangerous!
There is a hard drive temp. monitor, that does 2 drives and gives you there letters. It’s free ware I downloaded from www.majorgeeks.com called CrystalDiskInfo. Give it a spin
First off, I really appreciate this blog, I’m just catching up on this thread, and it’s really interesting reading … thanx to all for contributing.
I’ve been running an old DELL Dimension 8200 (P4 2Gig processor) machine since 2001. I have added all sorts of stuff to it over the years … a second hard drive, high speed USB card … added some more RAMBUS RAM … a second DVD/CD burner drive … and probably some other stuff that I’m forgetting. It should be noted that I never changed/upgraded the power box. That’s something I’m planning on doing within a week or so.
For the past two years (at least) I’ve noticed that my hard drives run hot. My primary runs betwen 66-70C … the secondary drive (mounted right beneath the primary) runs about 5-6 degrees cooler.
Now, I have asked around, and it seems that everyone points at the old power box that I never upgraded. Does this sound plausable to you guys? I’m also looking at getting some extra fans, but I’m really curious as to the ‘why’ … why are my drives running so damn hot in the first place? Also worth noting, that DELL insists on encasing their fans in this big green casing that seem to point all the air circulation to the low end of the tower box … of course, the hard drives are up higher … to the naked eye, it doesn’t look like they get any of the air being blown around … but that’s just my lay-man eye. I’m also gonna try and remove that stupid green casing around my fan.
What do you guys think about the power box though? Will getting more power lower my HD temps? I should mention that I’m running two almost brand new (less than a year old) WD drives (320 gig, and 500 gig).
Any thoughts would be really appreciated.
-Paul
I have a WD 250gig i got from newegg about a year ago. This drive has been on the fritz had to reformat a couple times, always had data backed up though fortunately. However lately it has been shutting off on me and upon running a tempature tool its hitting 85C under load, and still very hot @ idle. Its running right next to a maxtor HDD which contains OS and some programs…its at a steady 50C(maxtor) (would probably be cooler if it wasnt running next to the western digital). IDK what to do about this, this harddrive just doesnt seem to want to operate cool at all, I’m probably gonna end up pulling my data off and junking it… I wish I could get it replaced free of cost with a normal operating tempature one…I might try to contact western digital, tell me guys HOW BAD IS 85C when the room is about 70F an all hdd’s in here running no higher than 105 F really
This was a good read, both the posts and the comments. I just installed a fan in one of the rear slots to try and get more air moving around in an older HP Pavillion box (lousy cooling) with 2 hard drives that now run at 46C. I will say that the drive that came with the computer (Seagate) has never failed on me, and its a little over 6 years old. I had a Western Digital in there as well which failed (to be expected, a friend gave it to me and said ‘here, good luck’ and it ran very hot), and I just threw another WD in there and hope to have no problems. But despite the horrible cooling in the case (drives ran a bit over 50C before the fan install) I have been really lucky and had very minor and far between issues. Its an old machine (P4 2.54ghz) and I back up the data regularly so I’m not going to worry too much or throw a bunch of money into a new case, but the $10 I spent for the fan was worth it.
JDonner “In your case that would mean that you’re in a room with of 12-14 degrees. Nice try though LOL”
I’d just like to point out that my PC is in a room that often gets down to 15 degrees in December, sometimes lower. So how do you know he’s not in such a room?
At the moment though, it being June, the main drive seems to peak at 36C, with a 12cm fan in front of it. The hardly-used second drive reports peak of 29C, with room temp of 24C.
This is an interesting discussion but doesn’t seem to have generated much hard data either way. Still I’d like to get that temp down, but don’t think I could cram in any more fans into the case.
@Paul, those HD temps seem insanely hot. Surely that drive is heading for disaster. Unless the sensor is malfunctioning?
I have been using MAXTOR DRIVES for years…Almost all of them run under load in low 21c all the time. Last couple years I switched to Seagate (Best warranty)…and I find they run consistantly from 34c to 38c in same cases.
I too, on an older case, use an external fan blowing inside to keep the hd cool.
I recommend HDD Health as good program to monitor your hd
Cheers!!
ive been running 2 maxtor drives now for the past 5 years.
ones a maxtor 6L040J2 40 gb which is my os drive and runs at nearly a constant 50c/122f, the others a maxtor 6Y060L0 60gb which i use for bittorrent (so it runs constant) which runs at about 63c/145f.
the system runs 24/7 and gets restarted about every 4/5 days.
i format the 40gb about every 4 months or so and reload the os the 60gb has only been formatted once and that was when i installed it.
even though both drives run really hot there is no bad sectors and absolutely no data loss.
i dont know if they run stable at these temps because they run constant or not but so far ive had no problems from them
Jeff, thanks for the article (and thanks to the rest for the comments.) I recently had a 500GB WD SATA drive (you know the ones that come 2 by 2 in the MyBook External USB/Firewire Drives) - anyway, I too have a infrared gun which I used to test the failed drive, it was 196 degrees F when it failed after I took it out of the case (which was a little while so I am sure it was over 200 degrees.) - The gentlemen who commented on those external cases being little ovens, was definitely correct, I took the other 500GB drive out of the MyBook enclosure and placed it in my desktop and am happy to say that it runs 41C, and so far I haven’t had a any major problems with it.
I will never buy another one of those MyBook enclosures again.
Regards,
Jim
Thanks for the article - When I found my hard drive was operating at around 70-80oC (according to HWMonitor) I wondered if that was cause for concern.
Now I can justify spending some money on a new case with room to fit a fan to cool the hard drives.
Cheers, Joel
I read couple of case cooling articles where air flow must be from front to back, etc. Well I applied them to my Computer and I experienced significant loss of performance.
I removed all the additional fans and my system is back to its original kick ass speed.
I am wondering why this happened.
Plz let me know at Claymore@in.com
I recently ended up in the same boat… I have a hard drive monitoring software package installed because of a hard lesson learned where I lost all my personal and work information when a drive just died suddenly… that drive was about 100 gig or so in size. After replacing the drive, I lookd for some software to monitor it and that is how I found that I was now having a problem… My drives starting moving up with temps of around 120F even at idle. At first I thought it was just the house furnace coming on or something but that was not it.
From what I am reading that is a very high limit and I knew something had changed to cause this to happen in a few short days… then I start looking and found my main inflow fan was clogged completely with dog hair!! My huge german shepherd has been shedding massively in time for winter… My computer is in a new location from last year but it did not dawn on me that this would cause an issue… Well it did and wow what a difference it made… I am lucky I caught this before I lost massive amounts of data again… this time I have five (5) 250 gig harddrives connected…and I admit, not all are completely backed up…
BTW, I would highly recommend you all get something to monitor your HD temps like I did… My case does not have guages so I had to go with software… and I wanted something that actually worked AND gave me full configurability. The package I finally came across was Hard Drive Sentinel (HD Sentinel) and I recommend it big time to anyone needing to monitor your drives in real time. It does a whole lot of stuff and has a great interface IMHO… it even creates systray temp icons for ALL drives and/or partitions independent of each other which really helps I think.
Well back to more reading… take it light everyone…
Jake
I will traveling to India very soon, and during the hot months there sometimes the standing air temperatures are 110 degrees Fahrenheit and up. This coupled with high humidity is pretty terrible conditions for electronics in general, especially hard drives. Any advice on a large (aka not a portable drive such as the WD Passport, Iomega eGo Blackbelt, etc.) external hard drive that has good heat resistance? Maybe even with a built in fan? I just bought two WD Mybook Essential 1TB hard drives, and then realized that the operating temperature should not exceed 96 degrees Fahrenheit according to WD’s website! This is a very interesting debate, but hopefully someone can give some good advice to the web travelers that are looking for good info. Thanks for your help.
-Chris