Hard Drive Temperature

[Maejo Man]

I was transferring tons of AVI files from one HD to another and seeing that it was going to take an hour or so, I left it run. came back later and it said 3 mins to complete, and that's where it stayed. I gave it a while, but it didn't move. Couldn't cancel it, and everything locked up, so I shut the compter down. The drive was almost too hot to touch. It's a removable drive, so I left it out to cool down. My question is......How dot can a hard drive get before data is affected? I havn't put it back yet as still cooling down. Any advice would be welcome.

[thaibear1]

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[rabo]

It is unlikely that the temperature would erase the data on the hard drive recording surface. if the drive still works the data should still be there.

If the drive no longer works, the temperature has probably destroyed the electronic circuits. If the data is very important, you might be able to buy another drive of exactly the same model and ask a shop the put the new electronics in the old drive, then you should be able to use the old drive again.

Some luck required.

Edited July 1, 2010 by rabo

[Maejo Man]

Many thanks for the prompt assistance guys:jap:

[Gigabyte]

Hi,

There are standards and utilities to monitor your hard disk. You can check this link, it's a good starting point reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

[welo]

There is an often-cited long-term report from Google on hard-disk failure rates. They partly refuted the common assumption that colder harddrives are less likely too fail than hotter ones - average (!) temperatures that are too low (<27 °C) make a drive even more likely too fail than drives that get too hot. Of course we are talking about air-conditioned server rooms here!

The report states the optimum temperature range with 37 °C to 46 °C.

Your drive might have a SMART value for reading the current temperature, and if so it most likely also records the highest recorded value. Use hdtune or a similar program.

Found this good write-up of the topic, source: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Minimizing_Hard_Disk_Drive_Failure_and_Data_Loss#Temperature_control

== Temperature control ==

Overheating is purported to be a common cause of drive failure. Overheating can cause the platters to expand. If the disk's read-and-write head comes in contact with the disk's surface, a catastrophic head crash can result.

Each drive has a specified lower and upper bounded operating temperature. In addition, drives that constantly run relatively hot, i.e. near the upper bound of the operating temperature are thought to have a reduced lifetime.

Inadequate ventilation, especially during the summer months, can cause a drive's temperature to exceed safe levels. In desktops, this can be handled by ensuring that a computer fan is installed near each drive to move hot air outside. Other types of computer cooling can also be used as an alternative or in addition to basic air cooling. Air conditioning can be used if the room or the area in which the computer is present becomes too hot.

Laptops also can be cooled more using a laptop cooler, with an active cooler preferred over a passive cooler. This can be especially important if the drive's temperature is high.

External hard disk drives must preferably be enclosed in a disk enclosure that has a fan, rather than one without a fan. An absence of a fan in the enclosure can be partly compensated for by using an ordinary table fan to improve airflow around the enclosure. Stacking multiple external drives together, especially if they do not have fans, is strongly discouraged as it impedes heat transfer.

== Temperature monitoring ==

Several drives include a temperature sensor and a thermal monitoring feature. The sensor can be queried using software and the drive's current temperature can be steadily monitored. Two free Windows software applications that do this are HD Tune and SpeedFan. Several other programs are available as well. If the temperature exceeds a preset threshold, perhaps 50 °C, the monitoring application can be configured to log the event, warn the user, and shut down the drive or computer. If the drive includes a thermal monitoring feature, it shuts down the drive if its temperature reaches a critical level, perhaps 65 °C.

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]

Edited July 2, 2010 by welo

[steve187]

should be ok once it has cooled down, blow a fan on it in the future if you are going to use it for a long time.

[noudb]

Agree with the above mentioned temperature ranges, 37-47 should be fine. <br>However generally it is so that a hdd can keep working up to 60 degrees but they won't last very long at those temperatures. <br>If you use a hdd in an enclosure make sure you get one which runs cool by design like the new WD green ones.<br><br><br>

[jackiem]

Unless its super hot in your room then I don't think its the HD temp that made your transfer freezes. It might be your computer itself or the data has errors.<br>

[Royk]

I think the recommended maximum operating temp is 60C but high temp might not be the cause though. I once had some problems with transferring around 500GB of data and it turned out to be a defective hard drive. The problem was undetectable by normal scan disk and surface scanning. I had to use the diagnostic tools downloaded from the manufacturer's website to identify the problem.

Best regards,

Roy

[Phil Conners]

Buy a disk drive cooler, they cost less than 100 baht, are easy to attach and cools the drives down. My drives were all too hot to touch before and would generally fail at 1-2 years of age. Since using the coolers no problems.

[raro]

ready-made cheese fondue comes in bags that are about the same size as HDDs. If you put those bags in the freezer, they can be used as cooling pads after.

Done that before when I had a similar problem...