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Acceptable maximum temperature for hard drives?

Acceptable maximum temperature for hard drives?

  • 40° C

    Votes: 8 17.4%

  • 45° C

    Votes: 9 19.6%

  • 50° C

    Votes: 16 34.8%

  • 55° C

    Votes: 10 21.7%

  • 60° C

    Votes: 3 6.5%
  • Total voters
    46
E

EnderW

[H]F Junkie
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Sep 25, 2003
Messages
11,457
What do you consider as an acceptable maximum temperature for your hard drives?
 
As long as it works. I don't ever check the mechanical ones. Maybe I should. I think SSDs don't even make enough heat to check for either.
 
most hardrives are rated for max 50c older ones 40c I try to keep mine in the less then 40 but above 25c range
 
Looking at the spec sheets of WD's drives (the newer, non-Caviar lines):
WD Red: 0C to 70C operating, -40C to 70C non-operating
WD Purple: 0C to 65C operating, -40C to 70C non-operating
WD Green: 0C to 60C operating, -40C to 70C non-operating
WD Blue: 0C to 60C operating, -40C to 70C non-operating
WD Black: 5C to 55C operating, -40C to 70C non-operating
WD RE (yellow): 5C to 55C operating, -40C to 70C non-operating

Seagate desktop HDDs all have 0C (operating ambient minimum) to 60C (operating drive case maximum), and the same -40C to 70C non-operating. while their enterprise HDDs all seemed to be 5C to 55C operating.
 
I remember when 40c was generally what was suggested as the max you should let them get to. Ive never seen a consumer drive in a desktop/tower higher then that either, so you have serious cooling issues if yours are running higher then that. Of course higher temps are probably normal in laptops.
 
umm most of those drives are Caviar lines :)
I know google and many others have tested 100s of thousands of drives from various makers and they found a higher correlation of failure in mechanical drives that were ran closer to the minimum recommended in use temperature (and humidity) then a higher relative temperature (and humidity) from time of purchase to MTBF and out of warranty period age.

the "butter" zone if you will was 25c to 40c at ~62% humidity if I recall. There are drives that can handle higher temps of course such as enterprise drives or ones built for it such as velociraptors and laptop drives but generally speaking at least from what I have seen for I would daresay 90% of drives out there, 25-38c or so is the low and high end of recommended without taking a chance on the drive not lasting as long.

By all means make sure not to drop it, keep it securely mounted and keep its case clean can help a great deal as much or more then a couple deg Celsius to hot or cold :)

It could be they respeced the drives as they built them "tougher" or they want more failures I don't know, but 60+c on a HDD does seem awful hot for a standard drive, those things have insane critical tolerances or they simply would not function.
 
In my limited personal experience I had a lot of WD Caviar Black drive failures in my Mac Pro. It had pretty bad HDD cooling with temps in the 50 - 54 degree C range (I live in the tropics). HDD life seems way improved at 35 deg C which is where my current computer tends to keep things.
 
dragonstongue said:
umm most of those drives are Caviar lines :)
Click to expand...

Google for "wd black specs" (or any of the other colors) and the top two hits will be the pdf file "WD Caviar Black Series Disti Spec Sheet" and the pdf file "WD Black Series Spec Sheet". The Caviar specs are for the older versions of the drives, and in the more recent versions of the drives they have dropped the name "Caviar". The temperatures I quoted are from the non-Caviar WD drives.
 
cashkennedy said:
I remember when 40c was generally what was suggested as the max you should let them get to. Ive never seen a consumer drive in a desktop/tower higher then that either, so you have serious cooling issues if yours are running higher then that. Of course higher temps are probably normal in laptops.
Click to expand...

In particular, higher temps happen in NAS cases, where you have 5 drives packed in a very small box. This is why the NAS drives (such as the WD Red) are usually 5900RPM - they make much less heat than drives that run at 7200 RPM or more.
 
It's not about what I consider, it's about what the manufacturers who actually build and test the drives say they are rated to withstand. Different drives models have different limits and they are listed so you can look them up.
 
SirMaster said:
It's not about what I consider, it's about what the manufacturers who actually build and test the drives say they are rated to withstand. Different drives models have different limits and they are listed so you can look them up.
Click to expand...
yes, there are maximum operating temperatures in the specifications, but that doesn't mean everyone is comfortable letting their drives get that hot nor does it mean that drive life isn't decreased by some extent by running at or close to max
 
^ cheers Ender. if you know computer parts, then you would also know that high temps or even low temps can kill parts faster sometimes instantly sometimes just worsening their performance irreversibly. Example new Radeon R29x that AMD runs at 95c, omfg is that hot, might be fine during warranty, some of the older Nvidia cards also ran hotter then many of the chips were designed to handle and would die come warranty time. Better to be in the averages then the high or low end when it comes to temperatures for life of virtually every mechanical, electrical, or technological part. That is something that really has never changed

These guys engineer these things, maybe they know if you keep them at say 50c like their specs suggest you can that it will be fine for average use for 2-3 years but it will cook the chips etc, I would assume, there might be even higher issues with more modern drives dying as they do then older ones, it hasn't been that long since they dropped warranty lengths by 1 or sometimes even 2 years, why would they do that?
http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience/
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-hard-drives,4347.html
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Minimizing_Hard_Disk_Drive_Failure_and_Data_Loss/Environmental_Control
A common misconception is that a colder hard drive will last longer than a hotter hard drive. A study by Google showed the reverse to be true.[1] Hard drives with average temperatures below 27 °C had a failure rate worse than hard drives with the highest reported average temperature of 50 °C, and a failure rate at least twice as high as the optimum temperature range of 37 °C to 46 °C.[1]

So IMHO a drive running 30c to 40c or so is in the perfect butter zone and if not shaken rattled or rolled should last as long as possible countering other issues :)
 
I personally have only ever had one HDD fail on me. It was a WD 75GB Raptor that ran very hot for the 2 years I had it before it failed. I just assumed they worked that way due to the speed etc.

The replacement Raptor WD sent me back hardly got warm to the touch. One of a bad batch I guess.

I still have the replacement doing great service as a test/spare drive 6 years on.
 
For me it's 40C. I don't recall ever letting them, or seeing them get even that high. Although they are rated higher I would rather not experiment with it if I can avoid doing so. Data on a hard drive is already so easily corruptible just being magnetic and mechanical.

To be fair my 500GB WD External lasted 15 months in the desert and 6 years later it still runs fine, except for the power cord, so I would believe the rated heat numbers.
 
Liger88 said:
For me it's 40C. I don't recall ever letting them, or seeing them get even that high. Although they are rated higher I would rather not experiment with it if I can avoid doing so. Data on a hard drive is already so easily corruptible just being magnetic and mechanical.
Click to expand...

It really depends on your ambient temperature and also on the actual location of a sensor. For example if a sensor is in the area which gets lot of airflow from fan it could report lower temperature than if the drive would in the same spot, but other way around.

In my experience, i rarely seen WDC drives bellow 35C, and most times they run at 39-45C.
 
I had a cm 590 case, Silverstone raven 3 and now ante GX700, the 3 drives I have for WDC have been in use for ~5 years, 4 1/2 and 2 1/2 years respectively 2 wd caviar black 640s and 1 caviar blue 1tb 1 platter which is my newest one beyond my SSD (EALX model?) the caviar blue was in an external caddy fro about 1 year and only then did it ever hit 41c and only when it was in direct sunlight :p beyond this the hottest I ever got any of them was 32-34c in the dead of summer in an extremely hot room because I was mining at the time. without direct airflow (the 590 was crap for airflow) they hit 35c max.

I know drives shed most of their heat off the sides then they do the top and bottom, the Vrapors came with their own heatsink not sure if they all did as I never got one, but yes they apparently ran quite warm, as did the first caviar black 1tb.
 
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