How hot is too hot?


FreeMan

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How hot is too hot for hard drives?

 

I just finished rebuilding a drive in my array, and the brand new Seagate Iron Wolf was consistently hitting 46°C. I was using Parity Check Tuning to pause the rebuild, so that's about as hot as it got, but it spent 3 days bouncing between about 42-46°.

 

I understand that different drives may have different operating conditions spec'd by the manufacturer (Seagate says up to 65° for the IronWolf), but what's a "reasonable" and "sensible" number?  At what point should I worry about shutting things down to prevent drive damage?

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27 minutes ago, FreeMan said:

what's a "reasonable" and "sensible" number?

My WD Reds can get up to mid-40s in a parity check.  They are rated for 60 C.  I think anything in the 40s is just fine even for extended periods. 

 

Lately it seems that there is more concern about frequent wide temperature fluctuations (e.g. in the 50s for a long time and then down to  high 20s/low 30s then back up to the 50s) than maximum temp.

 

Frankly, I think any temp in the high 40s is fine for a drive rated at 65 C.

 

If your airflow is good, the drives can stand higher temps.

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Interesting, and thanks for the feedback @Hoopster. I just don't think I'd ever seen a drive hit above about 40-41°C before, even during a parity check.

 

I've got 5-in-3 cages, and this is the first time in quite a while that I've actually had 4 drives in any one cage. I've seen some comments about the IronWolf running hot, so maybe with it running hot and 4 drives (even though it was next to a drive that wasn't part of the array and spun down), the whole mess was just hotter than I'm used to.

 

I'd still welcome other's input, feedback, comments.

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9 hours ago, FreeMan said:

How hot is too hot for hard drives?

50's is too hot.

40's is tolerable.

30's is desirable.

The higher the HDD's operating temps, the lower its lifespan.

The case's airflow volume, static pressure and the air's temperature are crucial parts here.

But even with an optimum airflow it might not be possible to keep the densely packed drives in the 30's (under load) if your ambient temps don't stay well below of 25 degrees.

 

Edited by Lolight
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On 7/3/2021 at 3:05 AM, Hoopster said:

If your airflow is good, the drives can stand higher temps.

Airflow (cool air) is what removes heat from a HDD.

All by itself it doesn't make  a HDD more tolerable of the higher operating temps.

What matters is the resulting drive's temperature.

Airflow by itself is irrelevant to the HDD's lifespan.

 

Edited by Lolight
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50's is too hot.
40's is tolerable.
30's is desirable.
The higher the HDD's operating temps, the lower its lifespan.
The case's airflow volume, static pressure and the air's temperature are crucial parts here.
But even with an optimum airflow it might not be possible to keep the densely packed drives in the 30's (under load) if your ambient temps don't stay well below of 25 degrees.
 
This is more on line with what I believed and understood, but I've certainly got no proof one way or the other.

Thank you for your input.

I wonder if anybody has done /can find some research on what effect temp really has on drive lifespan. Sounds like something BackBlaze might have. I may see if they've got something.

Sent from my moto g(7) using Tapatalk

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After a brief DuckDuckGo search...

 

Here's an undated PDF from Icy Dock with scary warnings about how heat kills drives. Of course, they want to sell you their docks to keep your drives cool, so one should take it with a grain of salt.

Here's a 2020 page from ACKP claiming that "prolonged operation at temperatures under 20°C (68°F) or above 50°C (122°F)" will shorten a drive's lifespan. Of course, they want to sell you cooling solutions for your NOC, so there's a grain of salt with this one, too.

 

Both of those actually reference the same white paper from National Instruments, so there is at least some credibility (or, at least, consistency) to them. The NI paper states:

Quote

The condition that has the biggest impact on the life of a hard drive is temperature.  Heat decreases the life of the hard drive head.  A 5 °C increase in temperature could reduce the life of a hard drive by up to two years.  Heat also reduces the fly height of the hard drive head, which can cause the head to make contact with and damage the media.  If your system will be operated in an environment with a minimum ambient temperature less than 5 °C and/or a maximum ambient temperature greater than 50 °C, you must select a hard drive with an extended operating temperature range.  These hard drives include components designed for reliability in low and high temperature extremes. (Emphasis added)

Of course, NI wants to sell you their hardware for running tests on your equipment, and they want to sell you the "extended life" option if your conditions are outside those ranges, so again, a grain of salt.

 

Finally, I found a Tom's Hardware story from 2007 reporting on a Google Labs research paper (404, I couldn't find it at the Wayback Machine, maybe it's me). Tom's summary indicates that heat is a factor, but not the only or even biggest factor in drive death. According to their summary, Google didn't (yet) have any particular parameters that were credible in  predicting drive death. It does, however, mention that drives operating in cooler temperatures did seem to die more frequently than drives operating hotter and that only at "very high" temps did the trend reverse.

 

Tom's quotes may very well be the source of a lot of the conventional wisdom at this board:

  • Once a drive is past the infant mortality stage (about 6 months of high activity), death rate drops until about 5 years have passed
  • Age alone isn't necessarily a factor, after 3 years, death rate stabilizes at about 8%
  • Drives with SMART scan errors show a 10x likelihood of dying of those that don't have scan errors
  • While 85% of drives with one reallocation error survive more than 8 months after the error, the overall death rate is 3-6x higher after the first allocation error than those without errors
  • 56% of all their drive failures had no SMART warnings at all.

 

All in all, it sounds like drive temp isn't the worst thing. All the things I found (again, just a quick scan) said that up to 50°C operating temp is OK. Of course, cooler is going to be better, but you don't want the drive reaching for a sweatshirt, either.

 

I still haven't found anything from BackBlaze, and they seem to be the preferred go-to for drive life metrics. Wonder if they do have anything on causes of failure, or just statistics...

 

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5 hours ago, Lolight said:

Is this one?

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-temperature-does-it-matter/

Their conclusion is surprisingly nonsensical (read the comments under the report).

That is one. I wasn't aware of any, but figured they'd have a report somewhere. It is decidedly inconclusive. The first thing I noted was their extremely cool temps - the min temps any of my drives report in SMART history is about 30°C (86°F). Right now my "server room" is about 25°C (77F) and I've got drives spinning between 36-44°C. My SSDs are always reporting either 30 or 33C (1 @ 30, 2 @33). They never change (makes me a bit suspicious, but they're cool enough I'm not concerned).

 

In general, it seems that occasionally hitting 50°C isn't quite the "instant death" I was initially fearing, but it is best if they don't get that toasty.

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9 hours ago, FreeMan said:

It is decidedly inconclusive.

More like deceptive and pointless to anyone who's not a data center maintaining optimum airflows in a perfectly controlled low temperature environment....

 

 

Edited by Lolight
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16 hours ago, FreeMan said:

Finally, I found a Tom's Hardware story from 2007 reporting on a Google Labs research paper (404, I couldn't find it at the Wayback Machine, maybe it's me).

You can find the google paper here: https://research.google/pubs/pub32774/

 

Other studies:

http://0b4af6cdc2f0c5998459-c0245c5c937c5dedcca3f1764ecc9b2f.r43.cf2.rackcdn.com/23104-fast16-papers-manousakis.pdf

 

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gurumurthi/papers/acmtos13.pdf

From the link above (AFR -Annualized failure rate):

HDD temps.PNG

Edited by Lolight
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  • 1 month later...

Well, my problem is fixed!

 

We just had the AC replaced and while they were doing it, I had them install a new vent in my office right in front of my server. With a steady dose of cooled air blowing up its skirt, the server temps stayed sane and I had 2 drives occasionally hit 40°C, but nothing higher during a parity check.

 

Of course, I'll have to get a cover for heating season because I don't want to cook the server, but it'll run nice and frosty now during the summer.

Edited by FreeMan
  • Like 1
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Anecdotally, I had my security DVR  in my attic, where it'd EASILY hit 130F and up here in FL, and the hard disk couldn't care less recording 24/7 all day in the 50's. Ran up there for 4 years before lightning took out the dvr mobo. The hard disk was still fine. YMMV. If it's under 60, don't stress too much as it's more likely something else is gonna break the drive or cause data loss, or you'll just upgrade for capacity. Just keep good backups.

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