Seagate Backup Plus 8 TB: runs HOT!

[80251]

I was trying to run the SMART long test on this external USB 3.1 HDD and the drive's temps shot up to 51°C. I've never had an HDD (or SSD for that matter) run that hot and for HDD's I've heard those kind of temps can lead to premature failure. I noticed the enclosure only has vents on the bottom. I suppose I could shuck the drive but I don't have any external enclosures that'll handle an 8 TiB HDD ATM. Can anyone recommend any well ventilated, external USB 3.1 enclosures for 2.5" or 3.5" SATA HDD's?

 

[Solaris17]

lol that is perfectly fine. my exos push high 55+ all the time.

the drives they put in the externals especially high capacity ones are nas and in some cases DC drives. These arent WD greens. they are meant to run all the time hammering away.

 

[80251]

55°C is what my 1080ti commonly runs at while gaming, but a hard drive?!!!!!

 

[GerKNG]

i had two WD Black external HDDs (these "Gaming Drives")
they both ran at 60-65°C and they had a small fan at the chassis. after shucking they ran at less than 45 under heavy load.

 

[80251]

60-65°C, not even my overclocked, over-volted 1080ti hits 65°C!

I had thought there was some sort of direct correlation between HDD temps and HDD longevity.

 

[ir_cow]

I had thought there was some sort of direct correlation between HDD temps and HDD longevity.

There is, but that depends on the model too.

 

[Solaris17]

There is, but that depends on the model too.

Not to mention...

60-65°C, not even my overclocked, over-volted 1080ti hits 65°C!

This makes no sense. You really cant be comparing this to a GPU. The temp probe for an HDD is probably in the controller which is the size of your pinky nail and covered with enamel on a pcb, and not actively cooled.

 

[LabRat 891]

Went through this same sentiment circa 03-04. HDDs can run warm.
There was a big 'huffle' over the topic in the AMD K8/Intel P4 era; there were even HDD waterblocks and water 'bags' for HDD cooling.
It (eventually) became largely accepted that generally, temperatures of your HDD were of little concern. This came after published server/industry reports on thermal tolerance/its effect on MTBF.
In my opinion, the reality is a little more nuanced; a 80C 70+C HDD would alarm me. 50-60c seems is well within design tolerances*.

After years of tinkering and working as a tech, I consider 'hot' to be 75-85C+.
-many modern ASICs and MOSFETs allow for 90-100+c operation, nowadays.

*edit:
pulled from Seagate NAS drive datasheet

Temperature, Operating (°C) 0°C ~ 70°C

Temperature, Nonoperating (°C) 40°C ~ 70°C

 

[80251]

Seagate has a whitepaper on HDD temps and the effects on reliability:
https://www.seagate.com/support/kb/hard-disk-drive-reliability-and-mtbf-afr-174791en/

"Hard drive reliability is closely related to temperature. By operational design, the ambient temperature is 86°F. Temperatures above 122°F or below 41°F, decrease reliability. Directed airflow up to 150 linear feet/min. is recommended for high speed drives."

It can't be an accident that the HDD rackmount enclosures in datacenters have powerful fans blowing across the HDDs. Maybe a HDD will function at 60°C but for how long relative to say it running at 38°C?

All I was doing was performing the SMART long test on this external HDD and it got up to 51°C, what would happen if I were writing terabytes of data to it?

 

[Harlow]

I've shucked a number of Seagate 3TB ST3000DM001 drives out of USB3 housings and find they run 15 to 20 degrees Centigrade cooler in a well ventilated PC case with good airflow over the drives. As a result, drive temperatures drop from the low 50's in USB enclosures to the mid 30's in a computer case, when the drives are being exercised. The datasheet for the ST3000DM001 shows Temperature, Operating (ambient min 0°C) and (drive case max +60°C).

Similarly, the datasheet for my Exos 7E8 drives shows Temperature, Operating, +5°C to +60°C. As a consequence, I wouldn't be happy if Hard Disk Sentinel Pro showed either drive type exceeding +60°C. The SAS drives in my HP Proliant servers are cooled by multiple high RPM fans which are very noisy at full speed.

It's interesting to see the temperature rating for the Seagate NAS drives mentioned in an earlier posting goes down from 0°C to +70°C for the 4TB ST4000VN000, to 0°C to +60°C for the 6TB ST6000VN0021 and 8TB ST8000VN0002 drives. No doubt additional platters in the 6TB and 8TB drives increase heating due to air (or Helium?) friction inside the drive housing.

I once tested some hard drives at minus 20°C in a climatic chamber at work. Although I could still read and write data to the hard drives at -20°C, when the drives returned to ambient room temp, I could not read back data written at -20°C. At the other extreme, the air circulating inside the test chamber was not allowed to exceed +50°C, to provide 10 degrees headroom for internal dissipation inside the drive.

When I'm transferring Terabytes of data to/from a 3.5in USB3 hard disk, I aim a standard desk fan at the USB enclosure to keep the drive temperature below 45°C. I'm sure the drive will be OK up to 60°C, but I err on the side of caution with important backup data.

 

[bobbybluz]

Went through this same sentiment circa 03-04. HDDs can run warm.
There was a big 'huffle' over the topic in the AMD K8/Intel P4 era; there were even HDD waterblocks and water 'bags' for HDD cooling.
It (eventually) became largely accepted that generally, temperatures of your HDD were of little concern. This came after published server/industry reports on thermal tolerance/its effect on MTBF.
In my opinion, the reality is a little more nuanced; a 80C 70+C HDD would alarm me. 50-60c seems is well within design tolerances*.

After years of tinkering and working as a tech, I consider 'hot' to be 75-85C+.
-many modern ASICs and MOSFETs allow for 90-100+c operation, nowadays.

*edit:
pulled from Seagate NAS drive datasheet

Somewhere down in my basement I have two hard drive coolers that I used with the first 36GB WD Raptors. They have two fans each and mount on top of the drives. They didn't work well (if at all). Both Raptors died within a year and WD replaced them with the 74GB models. The drive coolers were banished to my black hole of odd PC parts forever.

 

[80251]

@bobbybluz
I had wondered about those HDD coolers particularly in top mounted fan configuration, considering the lid of HDD's is insulated from the body of the HDD by the gaskets I don't think it would be effective to cool the top cover on HDD's. I'd imagine the servos and drive motor are the things generating the most heat in a HDD -- and they're all attached to the case not the cover.

 

[Shrek]

Seagate has a whitepaper on HDD temps and the effects on reliability:
https://www.seagate.com/support/kb/hard-disk-drive-reliability-and-mtbf-afr-174791en/

"Hard drive reliability is closely related to temperature. By operational design, the ambient temperature is 86°F. Temperatures above 122°F or below 41°F, decrease reliability.

122F = 50C, which is where you were when you pushed the drive.

All is well.

I once tested some hard drives at minus 20°C in a climatic chamber at work. Although I could still read and write data to the hard drives at -20°C, when the drives returned to ambient room temp, I could not read back data written at -20°C.

Facinating; how long back was this?

 

[R-T-B]

It should be noted the SMART Long test (varies by vendor, but typically) does a lot of random sector read/writes to stress the drive. It is designed to be more stressful than any average workload. You'll probably never hit the temp it brings transferring random files.

 

[AusWolf]

I've got the exact same drive. Sure, it can reach 50+ °C during extended work, but it's nothing to be afraid of.

 

[Harlow]

A fair amount of heat generated inside hard disks comes from friction due to the passage of air over the spinning platters. More heat is generated as the number of platters increases. A hard disk with only one platter will run relatively cool. A hard disk with five or more closely spaced platters will run hotter. Drive manufacturers sometimes fill their high capacity drives with Helium instead of air. Helium gas is less dense than air (predominantly Nitrogen and Oxygen) so there's significantly less heating due to friction with Helium.

The hard disks I tested at minus 20°C in 1989 were 20 Megabyte Lapine Titans. We wanted to see if the disks would survive if started up in a room where the temperature had dropped below freezing overnight. The test results prompted us to glue heater element strips to the underside of the disks, with a thermostat set to switch on when the ambient temperature fell below 0°C. More recently I've tested equipment in climatic chambers at minus 40°C and minus 51°C, but obviously these systems did not include hard disks!

I notice the largest increase in temperature on 3.5in disks in poorly ventilated USB3 enclosures when continuously transferring large quanties of data (Terabytes) to/from the drive. Simllarly, you can see the disk temperature rise and tnen level off when performing a full drive surface read/write test in Hard Disk Sentinel Pro, taking many hours to complete.

I run a full HD Sentinel surface read test on all my hard drives (new or second-hard) after purchasing. There's no point fittng a duff drive into a multi-disk RAID-Z2 TrueNAS Core array, only to discover it's dodgy some time later. On larger capacity drives the surface scan for each drive takes 8 to 12 hours, or even longer. Some people "burn in" or "scrub" their NAS/server drives for several days before using them for data. This usually gets rid of early "bath tub" failures that weren't spotted in the manufacturers' production tests. Impacts greater than 300g sustained during shipping can damage hard disks.

If you'd like to see an effective way to remove sensitive data from a hard disk, click the link to the YouTube video below:-