Necessary to cool HDD's? (2)

[Guest]

Is it necesasary to put Seagate Barracuda 1TB + Seagate Momentus 750GB under case fan airflow

[AbydosOne]

1 minute ago, Berkomeister said:

Seagate Barracuda 1TB + Seagate Momentus 750GB

It's not entirely necessary, but failure rate goes up (very slightly) with increased operating temperature. If they don't already have some airflow and you can point a fan over them, do it.

[Guest]

Just now, AbydosOne said:

It's not entirely necessary, but failure rate goes up (very slightly) with increased operating temperature. If they don't already have some airflow and you can point a fan over them, do it.

They are already under airflow. My case is kind of stupid in a way that half of the screws that hold that fan are not really stable

[Guest]

33 minutes ago, youngboy said:

You don't need dedicated fans for drives, but you don't want your drives suffocated as well. As long as you have a good amount of case fans, you should be good. Dedicated cooling will help but usually on most cases the drive cage is in the front, so as long as you have fans in the front of your case, you should be good, unless you have a server and lots of drives next to each other, in servers, dedicated cooling is good, but in non server cases people use, as long as you have fans in the front, since that's where most drive cages are, you are good.

Thanks for the explanation

 

[mariushm]

Google did a study and discovered hard drives are quite sensitive to heat, and the risks of failure increase with temperature.

See [PDF] Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population, page 5 & 6

 

If you want lowest risk of failure, try to keep drives between 30-35c and 45c ... lower or higher, and risk of failure goes up.

Second figure shows if you keep drive all the time above 40 degrees there's a much higher rate of failure after around 3 years of 24/7 use... but also note very low temperatures (ex 15-20c) will accelerate failures and weed out the lemons in the first 3 months or so of use. 

 

Now in your case, with just a fan or something like that in front pushing air through the case, it's probably enough air flow and your drives are probably within this perfect range of temperatures, so you don't need to worry about it.

 

 

[mariushm]

1 minute ago, youngboy said:

Very interesting. Now does this study apply to servers? Or this is for normal cases where is the drive cage is in the front?

This is a study on a large population of drives (tens of thousands maybe hundreds of thousands) of drives in Google datacenters.

Most racked servers, with 1 to tens of drives installed like you'd install them in server cases .. either screwed inside, or in those small bays with doors that can be opened in front of the case.

So basically no special "storage servers" with fancy anti vibration or custom cooling, (mostly) regular server cases. They experimented with temperature inside the whole server or inside whole racks or cages of racks and logged smart data over years of operation of their servers..