Is my hard drive too hot, cold, mounted right?

[Steevo]

We seem to have threads every so often with the question posed above, and many users have a lot of experience with hard drives no doubt. But there is a study done by Google with over 100,000 drives from multiple manufacturers represented. This only applies to mechanical hard drives.

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf

"Contrary to previously reported results, we found very little correlation between failure rates and either elevated temperature or activity levels."

Optimal drive temperature is between 35-45C

Above 45C or below 30C the failure rate doubles from the standard 1% to 2%, so still not a large failure rate. Below 25C the rate doubles again, 4% and the trend continues from there, the lower the temperature the higher the failure rate.

Understanding that there are bearings inside the disk that allows the spindle to turn, and the bearings and lubricated with a grease, which is a mixture of oils in an emulsifier designed to hold the oil in suspension until a specific amount of force is applied or temperature is reached, below this temperature the emulsifier and oil is more viscous (thick), causing more torque (rotation force) to be needed, and increasing the power draw on the spindle driver circuit. Why grease and not oil? The inside of a hard drive is sealed and is cleaner than an operating room, a speck of dust to the harddrive is like getting hit by a small car to us, except the dust stays inside, so oil leaking into the disk would almost guarantee a complete and total failure and seals that have to withstand billions of revolutions and are still able to hold oil with 100% integrity only exist in theory.

Moving on, Google uses velcro on a lot of drives. Use whatever your case came with.

There is no superior mounting orientation **UNLESS SPECIFIED BY THE DRIVE VENDOR**

In short, warm drives are better than cold, all drives will fail, backup your data.

 

[Nabarun]

The ambient temperature in my locality ranges from ~15C to 46C across the year, and therefore I need to keep an eye on the temps a lot. In addition to the usual monitors like realtemp/coretemp, GPU-Z etc, I also find HDD sentinel to be very helpful. The system tray info about the HDD temps tell me when I have to open the case window and/or turn on the AC.

 

[Steevo]

We reach 39C occasionally in Montana, and last year I put my computer in a non air-conditioned part of the house when it was 38C, as it dumps a LOT of heat and the house was already hot, and my hard drives were running 60C, so I turned them on edge and allowed air to flow between them, it dropped them to the low 50C range. But most drives are designed and built to go into small office boxes, where the only fan may be one that cools the CPU/PSU, a lot of prebuilts are this way, and hard drives are always cooking in there, most users on this Forum have a good understanding of airflow and cooling, so their hard drives are the exception, not the rule, and when hard drive manufacturers say things like "a cooler drive is always better" it was probably to HP/Dell/Lenovo who build cheap boxes with piss poor airflow that get stuck in a box thats already hot and has only the hole for cables to go through for airflow, or sit by peoples feet who run small space heaters when its cold outside. I had a secretary once who was throttling her CPU running MS Word and listening to music, her box sat on the floor under her desk and she had a space heater, and it was blowing on the box.

Long story short. Warm is better than cold, and cold is just as dangerous as really hot.

 

[P4-630]

So in other words, it's just best to buy and use SSD's.

 

[Steevo]

So in other words, it's just best to buy and use SSD's.

I still use 2 3TB drives in RAID 0 for my games, media, and storage, the cost per TB is way cheaper and it performs very well. I backup. Backup anything you can't afford to lose right now. Pictures, Movies, Music. OneDrive gives 5GB of storage, Google gives some, small portable hard drives are cheap too, backup onto one and keep it safe.

 

[RejZoR]

So in other words, it's just best to buy and use SSD's.

Depends. If you value speed, absolute silence and less heat produced on the intake, certainly. Especially if you'll go full SSD. Once you try this, you'll never go back to HDD or SSD boot drive with HDD for data. But it's still very expensive to go with 1TB or 2TB SSD. But it's so damn worth it. And when you go this high with dedicated SSD, don't be cheap. Buy something reliable. You don't want to lose all the data just because the drive was made cheaply.