Hard drive power usage

[Faisal A]

How much power does a average (e.g. WD blue) 3.5 inch hard drive use ? Also, does cooling them increase my performance ? My case allows a fan to be attached to the hard drive cage, so I am guessing that there must be a benefit.

[mockedarche]

Harddrives can get decently hot (mostly external in a enclosure). Would it increase performance not from what i've heard of only lifespan. Cooler components last longer (to a degree).

[FloRolf]

they use about 3-6watts ....

[mariushm]

22 minutes ago, Faisal A said:

How much power does a average (e.g. WD blue) 3.5 inch hard drive use ? Also, does cooling them increase my performance ? My case allows a fan to be attached to the hard drive cage, so I am guessing that there must be a benefit.

Less than 10w... typically 5-8w.

Cooling does NOT improve performance which is limited by the rotation speed of the discs inside and the data density (number of discs, if both sides of each disc are used and so on)

Hard drives ARE heat sensitive in the sense that they'll last longer if they're kept within a temperature range, which is 30..40 degrees Celsius. If kept above 40 degrees, statistically there's a much higher chance they'll day after around 3 years of 24/7 use.

Keeping them very cool doesn't help, it can actually affect them negatively.

 

See Google's reliability study (page 6) : https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf

 

Distribution of average temperatures and failures rates - i highlighted where you wanna be

 

 

 

^ ~9% of drives kept below 30c died within 3 months of 24/7 use and kept dying more often than warmer drives over time... a bit of heat is good... but you can see how the drives kept at 40c+ 24/7 started dying in larger numbers after 3 years