Hard Disk Drive Temperatures: Hot? Or Not?

[Crazy Buddhist]

This thread I have started to discuss the issue of ideal operating temperatures for Hard Disk Drives:

From Hitachi's website (http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/technolo/drivetemp/drivetemp.htm):

"Heat has a major effect on drive reliability Disk drives are complex electro-mechanical devices that can suffer performance degradation or failures due to a single event or a combination of events occurring over time. Environmental conditions that affect drive reliability include ambient temperature, cooling air flow rate, voltage, duty cycle, shock/vibration, and relative humidity. Fortunately, it is possible to predict certain types of failures by measuring environmental conditions. One of the worst enemies of hard disk drives is heat."

Discuss ..... ????

CrazyB

[dgrmkrp]

I can't say I've read a lot about hard drives, but we did have a bit of a bursh with them during technical English classes.. was a tad superficial, but one thing that is important for all electronics is that the faster you go (for a given signal, in order to make it faster, you lose amplitude, for a given circuit.. look at RAM, you need more volts when over clocking because you have to make sure that low is low and high is high.. enough), you should stay cool to keep thermal noise down and have a clean signal. The reduction of temperature means ICs will work in nominal conditions, fewer clocks are wasted in attempt to correct errors and the lifespan of active elements is increased.

I had a hard drive die on me because of heat.. I quickly and almost exponentially developed bad sectors and then it became unusable. I think heat mainly affects the mechanics and their controllers... because I've seen 3 hard drives make banging noise, get hot and die...

Also, I've never had troubles nor seen any die if they had at least some airflow to keep them under 40 degrees centigrade.. if it gets to 50ish, it's bad... A room mate has one of these hot beasts and he can't wait for it to crash to send it back and get another, because a hot running drive is not covered by the warranty.. So, he doesn't keep any valuable data on it.. Backup, backup, backup.

Basically, keep it cool!