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Hard Disk temps

L

letdown427

Golden Member
I guess as with all electrical stuff, cooler is better, but what is an acceptable temperature for hard disks? Mine are normally around 35 -40 degrees is that going to be ok? I'd hazard a guess that anything over say 50-60 is gonna be bad, is that about right?

thanks
 
cool, just thought I'd check, I temporarily unplugged my pair of 80mm intake fans that were handily cooling my harddisks too , and only the hard disk temp really went up much, by a couple of degrees, but they dnt go above 39, so im happy. and pc is so quiet now too. lol.

thanks
 
I don't think intake fans will do too much to cool hard drives unless there's a better medium to cool the drive than air (e.g. you have heatpipes coming out of your hard drive). However, mine is at 30C due to my awesome 120 mm intake...but that's to provide air for my soon-to-arrive Silencer as well.
 
Originally posted by: RallyMaster
I don't think intake fans will do too much to cool hard drives
Click to expand...

I disagree. I had some 160gb Maxtor IDE drives that ran about 50-55C pretty consistantly in my P160. I put in a 120mm intake fan and it dropped the temps to 35-40C.

 
Originally posted by: RallyMaster
I don't think intake fans will do too much to cool hard drives unless there's a better medium to cool the drive than air (e.g. you have heatpipes coming out of your hard drive). However, mine is at 30C due to my awesome 120 mm intake...but that's to provide air for my soon-to-arrive Silencer as well.
Click to expand...

Fans provide a great deal of cooling for HD's, if the fans are blowing across the drive. You can use aluminum HS's or heatpipes for HD cooing (Zalman makes one right off hand) which provide a little cooling for the HD, but this is normally when you have your HD in a suspended or isolated (not touching the case) setup. By having your HD screwed into your case either directlty or via rails, the heat is dissapated (?) to the case which acts as a heatsink for the HD. For the OP, it's best to check with your HD manufacturer to see what they recommend for "normal" safe operating temperature. It will vary by manufacturer. The temps you report now seem okay.
 
According to smartfan my HDD's hang around at about 28-30.

Only seen 'em go above that when doing some drive intensive work. Okay, they're behind a 120 😛
 
I'm going to resurect this thread in the hope that I get some answers as to why my Western Digital 250GB Sata 2 drive constantly runs at 48-50C with ambient 19-22C. I spoke to a techie and he asked how am I measuring hdd temperature? My answer of course was using Speedfan. Howerver I couldn't explain where the temp reading was phsyically comming from as there isn't a temp sensor.

So how does speedfan measure hdd temperature. Is there a sensor built in the hdd and linked to the cable? If so how accurate is it really? I'd like to find out if there is an accurate way to measure temps?
 
Temp reading is inside the hard drive. Modern hard drives (from about 2000/2001) have a feature called SMART which send info about drive fitness, how much its been used, temps etc. through the IDE/SATA channel.

Hope this clears things up.
 
Originally posted by: amt
I'm going to resurect this thread in the hope that I get some answers as to why my Western Digital 250GB Sata 2 drive constantly runs at 48-50C with ambient 19-22C. I spoke to a techie and he asked how am I measuring hdd temperature? My answer of course was using Speedfan. Howerver I couldn't explain where the temp reading was phsyically comming from as there isn't a temp sensor.

So how does speedfan measure hdd temperature. Is there a sensor built in the hdd and linked to the cable? If so how accurate is it really? I'd like to find out if there is an accurate way to measure temps?
Click to expand...



Check that S.M.A.R.T is enabled in the BIOS. On the newest speedfan(v4.28), if you go to the S.M.A.R.T section, there's a link to an online diagnosis kinda thing. Anyway, that gives a load of information about your specific hard drive, and expected temperatures.

48-50 seems toasty. With 22 ambient (that might not be a perfectly reliable reading) my speedfan reading is 35ish.

I made another thread about it, but conclusion wasn't reached, if you have RAID0, what reading does speedfan give you? Hopefully someone who reads this will know. I'm allowed to threadjack, I'm the OP. 😛
 
amt, what is the location of the drive like? Conventional mounting in a drive cage of some sort? Is the drive sandwiched inbetween two others? Does it have any active airflow over the drive?
 
I had a question on this before...
Seagate drives..7200.8 series has an operating temps of 0-60C
 
Drive temperature and reliability information don't seem to be easy to get from the manufacturers. I'd guess that the MTBF failure, etc., rates are specified at some very nice & low temperatures, but I can't find it.

Looking at enterprise stuff, where the specs are more detailed, I see that Seagate specs 5-55C operating temperature for one of their SCSI drives on the sheet, but looking at a more detailed doc, that changes to 5-50 with an additional 20 C/hr max operational change. That 20C/hr means that at a toasty environmental of 30C, you'd have max operational at 50, because you'd get hotter than that in the first hour after startup, and if you have a more normal temperature say of 22, you'd exceed the spec at 42. I personally wouldn't worry about this a lot unless you're starting and stopping your drives a lot, but just wanted to point it out.

http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/enterprise/tech/1,1084,655,00.html

Maxtor has some more general information, in particular they spec that the temp readings in this context are taken off the top of the drive. Nice & convenient, and easy to measure with a number of devices. Some interesting material about airflow in that doc as well.

All Maxtor ATA, SATA, and SCSI drives can operate with or without a fan, providing the hard disk temperature does not exceed 131°F (55°C) as measured from the top cover of the drive. Reliability will be compromised when the drive is exposed to temperatures above 55°C or 131°F. When in doubt of your system's ventilation capabilities, or ambient environment of your hard disk, add an extra cooling fan to the drive bay or system case to force air across the drive
Click to expand...

http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/maxt...PTEmcF9zZWFyY2hfdGV4dD10ZW1wZXJhdHVyZQ**&p_li=&p_topview=1

One point is that with case selection and fan installation, it's very easy to bring down drive temperatures in practice, and that's shown in the Maxtor article as well. Most of my drives are operating in the low 30's, without noisy fans / elaborate cooling.
 
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