Hard Drive

[Gary A]

I have a Seagate 80 gb 7,200 rpm hard drive that was running up to 55C and triggering the alarm. The filter and fans are clean.

I bought another hard drive, another Seagate 160 gb 7,200 rpm and am using it for my main working drive. I formatted the 80 gb and am using it for backup. With both hard drives in the case, the 80 gb is running about 6 degrees C hotter than the new 160 gb. It is really not even working because it is just used for storage.

The 80 gb is about three years old. I would have expected it to last longer than that. My local shop stocks only Seagate drives. Both drives are SATA.

[harrry]

I have a Seagate 80 gb 7,200 rpm hard drive that was running up to 55C and triggering the alarm. The filter and fans are clean.

I bought another hard drive, another Seagate 160 gb 7,200 rpm and am using it for my main working drive. I formatted the 80 gb and am using it for backup. With both hard drives in the case, the 80 gb is running about 6 degrees C hotter than the new 160 gb. It is really not even working because it is just used for storage.

The 80 gb is about three years old. I would have expected it to last longer than that. My local shop stocks only Seagate drives. Both drives are SATA.

I would consider the drive to be due for replacing. Drives work hard and spin fast and after hree years the likelyhood of failure increases rapidly. Of course if your data is worth nothing it doesn't matter.

Edited March 19, 2009 by harrry

[Gary A]

I have a Seagate 80 gb 7,200 rpm hard drive that was running up to 55C and triggering the alarm. The filter and fans are clean.

I bought another hard drive, another Seagate 160 gb 7,200 rpm and am using it for my main working drive. I formatted the 80 gb and am using it for backup. With both hard drives in the case, the 80 gb is running about 6 degrees C hotter than the new 160 gb. It is really not even working because it is just used for storage.

The 80 gb is about three years old. I would have expected it to last longer than that. My local shop stocks only Seagate drives. Both drives are SATA.

I would consider the drive to be due for replacing. Drives work hard and spin fast and after hree years the likelyhood of failure increases rapidly. Of course if your data is worth nothing it doesn't matter.

My data is important to me so I have it backed on another remote hard drive too. It's just more handy to have the two drives in my case.

[dave_boo]

You say the fan is working and the filtre is clean....but is there actually any air flowing over the hard-drive cages? I've seen some piss-poor designed cases, and if there's no vents in front of the hdd's than no amount of airflow through the rest of the case is going to cool them.

[raro]

You say the fan is working and the filtre is clean....but is there actually any air flowing over the hard-drive cages? I've seen some piss-poor designed cases, and if there's no vents in front of the hdd's than no amount of airflow through the rest of the case is going to cool them.

exactly my thoughts! Get one of those HDD fans that get attached to the flat side of the HDD and feature two small fans. I brought down the temperature of one HDD by almost 10°C!

[webfact]

You say the fan is working and the filtre is clean....but is there actually any air flowing over the hard-drive cages? I've seen some piss-poor designed cases, and if there's no vents in front of the hdd's than no amount of airflow through the rest of the case is going to cool them.

exactly my thoughts! Get one of those HDD fans that get attached to the flat side of the HDD and feature two small fans. I brought down the temperature of one HDD by almost 10°C!

I got rid of the covers of these unused bays and placed a 150 Baht mini van in front of it as addition to the cooling system inside.

Temperature dropped another 5-8C! Air flow does the trick! Please note, temperatures between 50C to 60C for new HDD are not unusual.

[Tywais]

placed a 150 Baht mini van in front of it

Must have been a tight fit.

Same here, my case has a front fan directly in front of the drive bay and the temperatures are very good.

[dave_boo]

50-60 is extremely high for a hdd. I personally wouldn't want to see anything over 45. Stop and think about it, a hdd only consumes, at most, 12 watts. How can that 12 watts be turned into 50-60 degrees unless something is wrong?

Air flow across the drives is good! My CoolerMaster Cosmos has a nice setup. However, if you're not going to pay that much scratch for an enclosure, consider negative air pressure. Basically, instead of trying to force air into a case, and more likely than not creating turbulance and hot spots, consider what pulling air out will do. Since it will try and take the path of least resistance, the hot air surrounding components will be drawn out first. We all know that hot air expands, so take advantage of that rather than trying to force it back toward the source of the heat. Than it will attempt to suck air in from other openings.

Also, it's widely know that each ~5 degrees raise in the temperature of your drive will cut your MTBF in half......

[harrry]

the article below may be of interest.

quote

For modern hard disks, you can expect the service life to be about three to five years, a usually conservative number that is almost always greater than the manufacturer's stated warranty period. For planning purposes, especially for drives used in mission-critical high performance applications, you should expect to replace the drive well within its service life period. If the environmental characteristics where the drives operate are very good—factors such as proper cooling, good power regulation, and continued steady use without external or manual power cycling—then use the larger number. If you're in a mobile unit, i.e., an ENG/DSNG environment, use the smaller one.

end quote

http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/74364

I have found that the price of drives dropping and the speed increases of new drives makes up for frequent replacing. I then tend to use the old drives in portable caddies for additional backup or for trying out new operating systems etc.

Edited March 20, 2009 by harrry

[harrry]

Have you thought of using two identical drives in a raid configuration. This means that if one drive fails the data can be recovered on the other one and therefore the drives can be ran until they actually fail.

[webfact]

50-60 is extremely high for a hdd. I personally wouldn't want to see anything over 45. Stop and think about it, a hdd only consumes, at most, 12 watts. How can that 12 watts be turned into 50-60 degrees unless something is wrong?

Air flow across the drives is good! My CoolerMaster Cosmos has a nice setup. However, if you're not going to pay that much scratch for an enclosure, consider negative air pressure. Basically, instead of trying to force air into a case, and more likely than not creating turbulance and hot spots, consider what pulling air out will do. Since it will try and take the path of least resistance, the hot air surrounding components will be drawn out first. We all know that hot air expands, so take advantage of that rather than trying to force it back toward the source of the heat. Than it will attempt to suck air in from other openings.

Also, it's widely know that each ~5 degrees raise in the temperature of your drive will cut your MTBF in half......

How can that 12 watts be turned into 50-60 degrees unless something is wrong?

i.e. Barracuda 7200.8 SATA NCQ, ST3200826AS shows an operating temperature between 0-60C in their technical chart. Maybe an exception.

And this gives me the impression that 60C temperature will not "harm" your HDD.

[nikster]

To the OP: Yes, remove the covers and add additional fans. As an experiment you can just remove the covers and blow a normal room fan on the whole setup and see what kind of difference that makes. I am assuming you are not in an air-conditioned room with this, and in my experience most hardware thermal design seems to assume an environment temperature of 25 degrees max meaning things tend to overheat in Thailand.

My laptop HD was always overheating - it just stopped working at about 50 degrees, then I'd have to wait for a while for it to cool down. Somewhat nerve-wrecking as I was waiting to find out if data had been lost or if it was just a safety shutdown.

As for heat reducing life expectancy, that's certainly been my experience. I never had a HD fail before moving to Thailand. In Thailand, I have one fail every year so far for the last 5 years. I now expect my HD to fail, it's just a question of when.

Edited March 20, 2009 by nikster

[dave_boo]

i.e. Barracuda 7200.8 SATA NCQ, ST3200826AS shows an operating temperature between 0-60C in their technical chart. Maybe an exception.

And this gives me the impression that 60C temperature will not "harm" your HDD.

Consider this; the US Military has determined that a temperature of 60 is enough to sufficiently inhibit the growth/kill pathogens to mandate that being the minimum holding temperature of their food. Also condsider that hard drives are, by design, magnetic storage medium. And consider the Curie effect, which is the description of the loss of magnetisim in a sufficiently warm enough enviroment and I wouldn't want to be testing any manufacturer's upper limit (no matter how 'low' it's set to avoid lawsuits!). The fact that while other pieces of my machine can be replaced with little fanfare does not calm my heart when I consider that ALL my important data is on such fragile devices and even though I take steps to protect it, I sure wouldn't want to take any un-necessary risks.

[Gary A]

You say the fan is working and the filtre is clean....but is there actually any air flowing over the hard-drive cages? I've seen some piss-poor designed cases, and if there's no vents in front of the hdd's than no amount of airflow through the rest of the case is going to cool them.

I have a tall Antec case that has room for about 6 drives. I have removed all the caddies except for the two drives and they are spaced for maximum clearance between the drives and an empty space at the top and bottom. The filter is directly in front of the hard drives so all the air the large fan in the back of the case draws, passes around the drives. The new drive runs at about 40 C and the old drive about 46 C depending on ambient temperature.

Before buying the new drive and when the old one went over 55 C, I would take off the side cover and sit a 12 inch fan blowing into the case. That dropped the temperature far enough to use the computer, maybe around 47- 48 C.

[PattayaDavid]

This might be a stupid question, but what software are you using to monitor your hard drive temperatures. I have 4 hard drives in my Lian-Li case, but have no idea of the running temperature of each drive? The same goes for the hard drive in my ThinkPad laptop.

[Tywais]

This might be a stupid question, but what software are you using to monitor your hard drive temperatures. I have 4 hard drives in my Lian-Li case, but have no idea of the running temperature of each drive? The same goes for the hard drive in my ThinkPad laptop.

SpeedFan

Everest Home Edition

Both Free...

[kujirasan]

Thailand is, as you know way too hot and if you don't have air conditioning then the life of your HD is sadly limited to half of the temperate climes! Small fans are not effective but a large fan is, open the case and let the fan blow into it, I never used lap top, but be difficult to try to keep Laps cool in that heat!

I lost few HD when there!

[Gary A]

This might be a stupid question, but what software are you using to monitor your hard drive temperatures. I have 4 hard drives in my Lian-Li case, but have no idea of the running temperature of each drive? The same goes for the hard drive in my ThinkPad laptop.

I had one little program but didn't know whether to trust it or not. I downloaded and installed another one called Active Hard Disk Monitor. It gave the same results and it was also free.

[jobsworth]

kujirasan is giving good advise.

My pc started crashing about a week ago.

The climate has got much hotter and more humid.

I do not have air con.

The solution is to remove the top cover (the left hand side of the metal box.)

Then take a room fan and blow air directly into the case.

Now all is good.

I don't think that it is just the hard drive.

It is the cpu, the motherboard, the ram, the video card,...

Everything is affected by the heat.

Do you remember the man who built a copper tube and sat it on top of his cpu

and then filled it with liquid oxygen (I think it was)?

He managed to run a 3MHZ cpu at 5MHZ.

[Tywais]

Do you remember the man who built a copper tube and sat it on top of his cpu

and then filled it with liquid oxygen (I think it was)?

He managed to run a 3MHZ cpu at 5MHZ.

You may be referring to the record attempt, 5 GHz project, CPU cooling with Liquid Nitrogen

[harrry]

Thailand is, as you know way too hot and if you don't have air conditioning then the life of your HD is sadly limited to half of the temperate climes! Small fans are not effective but a large fan is, open the case and let the fan blow into it, I never used lap top, but be difficult to try to keep Laps cool in that heat!

I lost few HD when there!

Just opening the case is often not enough. Computers are designed to get airflow over the importtant components with a closed case and an open one may not enable air to be forced over relevant components.

Edited March 21, 2009 by harrry

[webfact]

I'm monitoring with this free program http://www.disk-monitor.com/compare.html