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Safe operating temp for HDDs

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Burner27

Supreme [H]ardness
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I have 4 HDDs in my machine in an Antec Sonata and I am using an enermax 94cfm 120mm exhaust fan only. I am including a picture of my computer's "guts" where I did have a fan next to the HDD rack up until 3 days ago. After I installed my 7800GTX, I found that the card is so long the PCIe power connector won't fit in with the fan in place. It had to come out. So......

My question is, at idle my HDDs run between 38c and 41c. Is this considered an "unsafe" operating temp?

I plan on adding a blowhole over the CPU/GPU on the side panel using another enermax 94cfm 120mm fan which should move a lot of air into the case.

Or should I just get a bigger case with an intake fan near the HDDs so air can flow over the HDDs?

Opinions/suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Pic:

PICT0087.JPG
 
Not even close most hard drives are rated to with stand 50c continous and 60c max.


I know the seagate 7200.8's are rated for 60c continous and 69c max. That is external temp taken the front edge of the drive.
 
The drives will be fine. If they get over 50C, take corrective action. If they get over 55C, you are probably shortening the life of a drive significantly. Under 45 is quite acceptable.
 
Thanks for the replies. Thise temps were taken under idle not load. Should I still be concerned?
 
Hard drives do not generate substantially more heat under load, as the main current draw is keeping the motor going. Looks like your coolign arrangement also doesn't allow much heat to build up in the case too, so you should be fine ven under load. You may want to run a burn in for a few hours and see how much hotter it gets inside, but methinks you'll be fine.

You like your 7K400s?
 
DougLite said:
You like your 7K400s?
Click to expand...


Yes i do. Very quiet and quick. The only thing that would make the setup better is to have 4 x 7K400s or maybe 2 x 7K500s?
 
DougLite said:
Hard drives do not generate substantially more heat under load, as the main current draw is keeping the motor going. Looks like your coolign arrangement also doesn't allow much heat to build up in the case too, so you should be fine ven under load. You may want to run a burn in for a few hours and see how much hotter it gets inside, but methinks you'll be fine.

You like your 7K400s?
Click to expand...


I would have to disagree with this statement. Part of my job is test thermals on hard drives that are in external enclosures. I typically see a 10c to 15c difference between idle and max load with scsi/fibre drives. Max load is almost always 100% random writes which while not a load patern normally encountered definetly heats the drives the most. These are of course 15k drives. The results I see for sata drives is normally a lot less maybe a 5c rise between heavy load and idle. So I would add a 5c pad to your temp readings to get your max. You could also use a program like iometer to generate heavy disk load for a while and see what the temps get to. This is would be the best method.
 
My remarks were based on ATA drives. It takes quite a bit more juice to deliver <4ms seeks than <10ms seeks. The extra 5C from an ATA drive more than likely isn't make or break, as if those 5 degreese were enough to push a drive into unsafe thermal territory, they were close to the danger zone at idle. Given that he is currently experiencing idle temps in the high 30s-low 40s, his drives should only get to the mid 40s during a full bore random IOMeter test, a condition unlikely to be encountered during normal linear and localized desktop application work. I'd be suprised if he sees anything over 45C from his drives during his normal use, unless his CPU and cooling system allow the ambinet temperature to rise dramatically in the case.

Of course none of my remarks apply to 15K SCSI drives :)
 
Do you think adding a blowhole to the side of the case closest to, but not on top of the HDDs drawing air in would:

A) Mess up the airflow design of this case
B) Help in cooling the HDD even though the fan wouldn't be directly on the HDDs?

Thanks.
 
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