I'm running dual hard drives as a RAID-1 mirror and it doesn't look like DTemp can read their SMART attributes. Anyone know of good software that can read the temperature from drives in a RAID set?

Oy. The WD in my Shuttle is currently idling at 46 C, but of course being a Shuttle there's no room for another fan. Thanks for costing me a night's sleep, Jeff!

My HD was running hot and I got a $12 HD fan which attaches to the drive. It brought the temperature down from 113F to about 70F. I was told fans can alter the air flow, but this seems to be working.

Also, I use a free temp monitor at:

www.rsdsoft.com.

You should revise on your physics a little. Every bit of electrical energy that goes into your PC is converted to heat. Conversation of energy in action. This includes harddrives. If it takes 12W of electricity, it emits 12W of heat, if 70W of electricity then 70W of heat.

I agree about keeping disks cool though. It really is important. Silicon can take the beating, disks can't.

That is, conservation of energy, not conversation of. Although the latter seems interesting too.

I've found that moving to 2,5" drives and Seagate had a great impact on the reliability of my data storage. The HD temperatures are below 40 degrees (my system has no active cooling) mainly due to reduced friction and power consumption of about 2-5W.

At home I have 8 fans running in my custom case monitored by a beefy front panel controller, quite often my hard drives get up to temp but I never thought of this as a problem, I normally only crank the fans when I hear my video cards fan's going nuts from the temp, this of course cause a big puff of dust to fly out the back of my case (I've got a couple 120mms at the back that often tidy the dust out of my case).

Smooshing CPU, memory, graphics cards, etc. and etc. with the hard drives all into 1 case may have worked in 1985, but with today's hardware I wonder if it's time to go back to the concept that this stuff should be in separate containers.

Good post Jeff. I noticed this was a problem on any hard drive that I put inside an external USB/Firewire enclosure. What none of the manufacturers of those external enclosures tell you is that these things turn into little ovens for hard drives. Pay the extra money to get an external hard drive built by the manufacturer (like a Seagate or WD) rather than rig one yourself with an old HD and a cheap enclosure. Also make sure you always turn off the external HD when its not in use.

Thanks a lot Jeff. It hasn't occurred to me that hard drives are *that* sensitive to temperature, but maybe that's because I've never had a hard drive fail on me.

Sorry, but that's not how it works in hardware world. If manufacturer guarantees the hard drive for 55 degrees Celsius, it is OK to run it at or close to that. Just like if a capacitor is guaranteed to withstand 250V, you can run it at 250V full time. Those folks are conservative, anything else is an open invitation for a lawsuit.

In fact, Apple doesn't even begin to cool the hard drive actively in their iMacs until it reaches around 50-52 degrees C. They also don't actively cool the processor until it gets pretty darn hot. Why do you think their computers are so quiet? Latest Intel chips are rated at 100 degrees Celsius. Unless you have to cool them before that (e.g. so that the laptop doesn't burn your lap), it's pointless to apply much cooling to them until they hit 80-90 degrees and when they do, even minimal amounts of airflow will do a great deal of cooling since temperature differential is so large.

Heck, I even use "fancontrol" utility on my Linux server in the closet. It spins the fans really, really slowly until it actually needs to cool things and then it starts ramping them up, also very slowly. I can't hear the box working.

> If manufacturer guarantees the hard drive for 55 degrees Celsius, it is OK to run it at or close to that. Just like if a capacitor is guaranteed to withstand 250V, you can run it at 250V full time. Those folks are conservative, anything else is an open invitation for a lawsuit.

I have no problem with people running their CPUs at 70c, or their video card at 90c. CPUs, video cards, and motherboards are slabs of silicon and wire. Hard drives are mechanical. They can't be treated the same way.

I value my data more than almost anything else on my system. Being a little conservative on the hard drive front is worth it to me. But it's your data, do what you want.

"Most manufacturers rate CPUs up to 70°C, and GPUs commonly rate to 90°C and beyond."

This is already changing and will even more in the future; GPUs have traditionally been rated somewhere below "won't melt the chip", rather than the more conservative "gives good data", since traditionally they were input-only and gamers could tolerate glitches. That won't work as we hit an era of GPU-coprocessor.

Totally orthogonal to your point, I know. ;)

DMB, hard drive MTBF doubles every 5-8 degrees cooler that a drive operates. This is well known and google digs up tons of tests. If you don't mind having your drives eaten every 2 years in exchange for less noise, that's your choice, but reducing heat can extend its life well past the warranty period.

> maybe that's because I've never had a hard drive fail on me

I've had a few fail, even though I end up completely replacing all my hardware in two years most of the time. You must be getting lucky, or maybe you use fewer machines than I do.. I have a computer addiction. ;)

On this machine, I have a *very* strong suspicion that the high operating temperatures (when the front fan was disconnected in order to reduce noise) contributed to the drive's demise, exactly as predicted by the Xbit labs quote. It failed in a subtle way, too, with bad and unrecoverable sectors. It was actually a giant hassle just to figure out what was going wrong, which made it arguably more painful than an outright failure.

This is actually great information. I had never thought to check my HD temp. I'm probably guilty of losing my data to the likes of my HD overheating. Thanks for the info.

I too would love a way to get drive temps out of a RAID setup, but DTemp is useful for solo drives anyway - I'll happily take a couple of numbers in the tray that tell me something useful over the other garbage that I keep having to remove (as Raymond blogged about again today). I just wish it could give me drive letters too, as I have a pair of identical drives...

Foxyshadis, it'd be interesting to find out such stats and how they were measured. The lowest quoted hard drive MTBF I've seen is 300000 hours. That's 34 years if you run it 24x7. That is why MTBF by itself means nothing. Now MTBF of a large number of drives is another story, but even then you literally need to run hundreds of drives for years under controlled conditions to calculate statistically accurate MTBF numbers. Somehow I doubt your Google hits will withstand a rigorous analysis. :-)

Look at it this way. If what you say were true, Apple would not run their hard drives at 50 degrees Celsius, and Seagate would not quote 55 degrees as max continuous operating temperature for their hard drives either. Replacing most of them under warranty is not economical.

Interesting, seems odd that hard drives don't come with any kind of passive cooling, a grill on the back, etc...

Running at a cool 86F. Sidenote, do you know of any good free CPU/Case temp monitors? I've been using motherboard monitor for a while now, but there's gotta be something better out there.

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?

I'm also curious as to this so-called "research". The source here is a sort of e-zine and doesn't seem to state what the experiment(s) was/were. It sounds about as scientifically sound to me as something from GRC.

...which doesn't make it untrue, of course. I'm simply not convinced.

How do you even test for such a thing? Not all drives are created equal - for obvious reasons, there's no way to test the same drive's lifetime at different temperatures. So you can only do this in huge batches expecting a random distribution, and you can only look at the MTBF. And if the MTBF is 30 years, then do you *really* care if you get another 5 years (or even another 50 years) out of it? Nobody keeps a drive for that long!

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.

dc, I use motherboard monitor, but it's a bit dated (however it gets the job done) and is lacking support for some of the newer CPUs.

None of you know what MTBF is do you?
MTBF 10mil years doesn't mean it won't fail in 10mil years.

I can test MTBF like this:
1000 drives, run for 1000hrs. Total run time = 1mil hrs.
Say 2 drives are dead. Whoopee! MTBF is 500k hrs! Joy!

No. 2 drives DIED after ONLY 1000hrs!

See how useful MTBF is? There's not even a standard way of deriving it.

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 +55°C as a rule, and occasionally to +60°C. 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 5°C 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?

"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.

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!

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

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.

keep up the good work.
Duncan UK

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

My HD is current running at 162C... Im checking it with speedfan. yikes...

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.

Thanks,
Joe

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).

How else can i cool them?
Im stumped

Fascinating research article from Google, based on data collected from the massive numbers of hard drives they use:

http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/02/16/google_hard_drives/

Interesting "infant mortality phase" result, too. No real correlation with heat, or usage, but some drives are just duds.

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

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.

I use a freeware software called SpeedFan (currently at vers 4.32).

It monitors HDD, memory, GPU core, and both my CPU cores for temp, and can also adjust fan speeds.

Google it, definitely a must have.

My Hard Drive on my laptop is running at 56*C. This is dangerous, I know. What can I do to cut the temperature down? I do not want to lose any data.

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.

Better to use Dtemp; boots fast, free, uses only 2 MB and also checks S.M.A.R.T. values: http://private.peterlink.ru/tochinov/

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?

Regards

gfuentes

'Thermal cycling'.

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, 40ºC idle and 50ºC 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.

I downloaded DTemp & it'll show info about both my hard drives, but only the temperature of the primary hard drive. How can I get it to show temperatures of both?

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.

My test utility says my drive is at 253?

You got to believe the utility is wrong here since the drive
is working great..

(Grin)

I just bought a drive today and put it in. I'm running it as my second hard drive. The original drive and the new one were running fine for about 6 hours until my system shut itself down. I opened up the case and realized that both drives had overheated. So I did some rearranging and spaced out the drives a bit more and it seems fine. I'm a little scared though. They new drive is running at 41 C right now.

My question is: WHAT IS AN IDEAL SHUTDOWN TEMP FOR MY DRIVE. It's a 320 GB WD.

Well I wish I had bothered to search let alone find this article like a year ago. My old case didn't have room in front for hd fans and now their making a high pitch noise. With speedfan it shows my hard drives were like running at 39-42C. Worst part is they just passed the 1 year warranty mark. Well they haven't died yet but with my new case if anyone ever wants a good case antec 900 is a very good sturdy case (comes with 2 120mm fans at front to cool the hd's. With new case cpu is down to 27-29C, hd's are down to 24-27C, this is using the lowest fan speed of 1200rpm.

If anyone wants a good program speedfan shows all temperatures, and if you click on the S.M.A.R.T tab and choose the hard drive you can perform an in depth online analysis which will show you the average temp min/max temp for that particular hard drive. I repost when I have my new hard drives (will have 1 80gig, 2 160, and 1 40gig) with 800rpm fans installed. Getting 800rpm for the 8dba noise level so lower speed but I'll tell you what the hd temps.

PC users are a broad range of people and it's nice to see an article like this. The title, "Hard Drive Temperatures: Be Afraid" is VERY apt. Something is needed to counter the tendency to not think about what's inside the black box; engineers excepted.

A cupola points:

I believe that temperature cycling, power cycling and humidity will also impact drive longevity. STASIS.

A PC thermostatic fan is great if installed thoughtfully. They often have higher MTbF and are quieter too.

MTBF can be a useful measure. As with a one or two things, it's when dishonesty skews the dataset that we lose meaning. I'm pretty sure too that we'd be suffering from the odd misinterpretation of statistics.

On the subject of whether heat output is strictly limited by energy input, in general it depends on type of machine ('machine' in the physics sense) and the materials from which it is constructed. However it is usually the case that heat output is <= electrical input power and I would expect this to be so for hard drives. As very probably an entirely 'classical' machine, albeit with sophisticated materials and control, in a hard drive I would wild guess 30% efficiency in the conversion of electrical energy to platter rotation and head positioning. 10W in, 7W out as heat.

How to get a readout of the temperature of RAID array drives? If you have room for a non-raid hard drive in the same cooling space, you can get a fair indication. This won't catch a calamity with any one drive but that's not really the idea, is it?

Some, sadly uncommon, software does retrieve drive temperature info from particular RAID chipsets.

Almost last, NOISE. Sorry to cause affront to worshippers of 24/7, full-surround noise pollution but I'm in love with quiet. I'll gladly trade those extra 5 years of hard drive life for a silent PC.

I don't think anybody mentioned HDD Thermometer, the software, of course.

good info. i recently got a FREE 80gb drive from a friend at work after they bought a computer which is a nice upgrade for me as i only had a 10gb before. anyway after reading this i checked the temp and my drive was running REALLY hot about 60c and i installed a cheap fan and while my machine is a LOT louder, my hdd is normally about 37c which im happy with! thanks for all the info and help

My oldest drive would run at 45c and beyond. The drive would fail non-critically by retrying, slowing things down (I could tell by examining the SMART logs). I finally got around to replacing it with a drive that was 4 times the capacity (you can't buy smaller drives new these days). The new drive is faster and my computer is more responsive. In the same location as the old one, the new drive is running 38c under load and 37c normally. I've been watching it for the last two days.

Pay attention to the drives, they'll show signs of age. It's worth updating to newer, faster, cooler, more efficient technology from time to time. Thank you all for your comments, I found them very helpful.

My mini-SAN device just hangs regularly lately, I wonder if HDD temperature has something to do with it:

# hddtemp /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /dev/sde /dev/sdf
/dev/sdb: WDC WD4000YR-01PLB0: 46°C
/dev/sdc: WDC WD4000YR-01PLB0: 50°C
/dev/sdd: WDC WD4000YR-01PLB0: 51°C
/dev/sde: WDC WD4000YR-01PLB0: 49°C
/dev/sdf: WDC WD4000YR-01PLB0: 44°C

Possibly, it can have some impact on a CPU, which is a Pentium M, and doesn't have a fan in this device...

I am amazed nobody has mentioned the old reliable "repair shop" way, which is simply pop the side off and stick a $10 box fan on low by it. I learned it from my boss who had 10 SCSI drives in a standard ATX case. It never did get hot. I've got 2 HDDs in an old Pavilion (worst case ever built,heat wise) and without the box fan trick there was no fan able to keep them cool. But with "old boxie" set to low my HDDs stay a cool 86f and that is with this machine running 24/7.

With this trick I haven't had a hard drive fail on me in ages. In fact,my desk drawer still has good 6-20Gb drives lying in it for when somebody needs a spare. My OS drive in this box is an old 20Gb Seagate that is so old it came with the "brand new" WinME,LOL! With a good quiet box fan it isn't nearly as loud as the case fans it replaced and the cooling results are ten times better.

Well it really rather interesting to read other people views on HDD temperatures. However, just bear in mind that we our experience is pretty puny when say compared to Google. Which, if you didn't know, released details of a hard drive survey which includes such exciting things as " ...and there is less correlation between drive temperature and failure rates than might have been expected, and drives that are cooled excessively actually fail more often than those running a little hot.."

IMO, it's down to changes in temperature. In the scenario of a machine that is constantly on, the hard drives will operate at an average temperature for prolonged periods. The opposite for a system that is power cycled more times than I have cups of tea. The constant cold to hot will stress the drives. Just my opinion of course ...

Interesting read here. I am a huge believer in case airflow. Good air in, bad air out. 2 120mm intake fans, 120mm exhaust, 90mm intake, 90mm exhaust, and the 120mm in the psu, a 120mm on the cpu.
Nothing runs over 50c ever. Even the video card. same amount of air in as out, and it is like an open setup only better.

Current temps @ 27c ambient, all fans running silent (17db max) hdd, 32c, 33c, 29cc 28c. Cpu 32c, Gpu, 38c.

If you value silence buy a decent $10 fan, or a fan controller. It will make everything last alot longer. Or go the long route and customize with a few extra led fans.

Or go with the box fan idea. Seen it done to overclock, no reason you couldn't use it with a computer 24/7. And the put out quite a bit of air even on low.

well now wasnt that educational,...... shame MY HD seems to run 131°F (58°C)idle and arround 147°F (64°C) under load. been that way about a year now.

Time to get the gateway cleaned.

Okay, this is the solution I came up with. See, I have an Antec Sonata 2 case, and the design of the case forces you to use the plastic insolation, as removing it leaves you with an inopperable screw hole, as it's wider then the hole required.

This is the solution I came up with:

First, I removed both floppy disk slides, including the one with the floppy drive in it. Hell, there's no more need for floppy disks these days. So, I took my seagate 200gig and mounted it to the floppy disk slide, upside-down. As in the slide is now mounted upside-down, leaving the drive in the middle, sitting halfway between the 2 floppy disk slots.

Phase 2: Sealing all the gaps. A PC case comes designed to leak air at every joint. But sealing the case up too much creates a degree of pressure, and pressure isn't a good thing, we want to maximise the airflow, not restrict it, or pressurize it. So, with my temperates all displayed, I trialled and errored sealing the case, and controlling the airflow.

First, I started at the back, make sure the back of the PC has all it's PCI slot holes closed up, make sure the grill either has it's holes fanned, or sealed. I just stuck down cardboard where needed. The next part is the front of the PC. I desided that the airfilter was working fairly well at sealing the case as is, so nothing was done to it. Down the side of the 5 1/4" bays I sealed the front bezel using a water tight sealant. Leaving the DVD unsealed, and the floppy bays open.

The results: Most the airflow from the front now passes over the seagate hard drive. Finger testing shows a stable temp at 35 - 36, and that is given I live in Australia without cooling, during a summer that gets very hot.

hello guys... i was going through the views. i am an electrical engg. temperature has a massive effect in the magnetic capability of the medium. (ie) ONE OF THE WAYS TO DEMAGNETIZE A MAGNET iS HEAT IT.

the data in the HDD is stored in a disk by magnetization. So u have to watch the temperature on the HDD or bad sectors may occour( mainly erasing of certain sectors (demagnetization)

Or any loss can occur. the temp tool is good i was searching one to monitor my HDD

I just bought a Cooler Master 690 and it has this big 120mm blue led fan in front of the drive I put in,and the amazing thing is that now i can touch the drive while its working!!!! That scared me because in the older smaller case i couldnt touch the drive cause it was so hot! I took physics class and it is true that to demagnetize a magnet is to superheat it (cause the north and south charges can freely move around when heated and lose that magnetic force). thank god i got this case or i probably would of lost all my data =/

I here there is this material that has magnetic properties but isnt subject to heat. Nd-Fe-B magnets anyone?

i'm sorry, but we're not at the point where everything is 100% efficient.

it may seem crude to you, but i have a case where i can connect and lay my hard-disks neatly on the bottom surface of my computer case. in the past, i've tried removing and ferrying hardrives to, from and back to my PC again. from experience the physicality of the drive is affected by the constant wear of tear of an electric current and whatever kinetic energy is part of its ... well, nevermind. just think of adequete PC cooling indirectly-- similar to how someone would take dietary supplements for the little benefits that they're advertised for-- again, for the slightest chance to increase your life-span.

Interesting.

Ideally keeping the case cold is good, but it is undoubtedly noisy too. I'd rather have quiet. Without the 120mm blower sucking air in over my 3 HDDs, they would be pushing up to 40c at idle, but down to a steady 28c with the blower (same temp as the mother board - which also receives some cooling from that fan). I'm tempted to just put up with the 40c for the peace it brings to my bedroom.

That said, the HDDs being largely mechanical would surely adhere to the rule of "electronics cold, mechanics hot"? Totally acceptable to keep the CPU, GPU and NB as close to room temp as possible, but do the mechanical drives really need that?

i took the side panel off my hp amd64 pc with samsung 200gb xp-sp2

i aimed a 3 speed floor fan 6in dia., at the drive

from 8 in away. result is a 26c-30c hd in a cool bedroom that is + or - 68f

thanks a lot.... this information surely will help me take good care of my computer

Well that was a good read...

Get a Shuttle...(SN25P)no problems at all...engineered cooling
above all others...I run 2 Seagate 500 gig 7200.11 in (room for 3)
ALso: 8800 GTS SSC 640 mb vid (dual slot)450 w PS...FX60 X2 cpu...

CPU 26 C, System 42 C, GPU 59 C, both HDD 40 C plus another 500
outside in an external SATA case... case socket connects direct to MB.
makes it as fast as internal HDD's...external reports back 39 C .
Dtemp, HDD Temperature, RivaTuner.

Crysis @ 50 +/- FPS under heavy gaming session only increases all
temps about 10 C +/-...vid card (EVGA) goes up to 78 C...

All in a cool aluminum box the size of a toaster...sweet...

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.

Interesting...

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°С 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°С, 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°С 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°С 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