what's max temperature for hdd?

[Rovtar]

What is max temp. for disk?

normal disks 7.200 rpm 120gb,ide?

tnx!

[Scubar]

depends on disk but i wouldnt want them above 50 as thats getting very toasty.

[Rovtar]

enough for windows freeze?

[Serra]

I think you can safely go into the 60's without much hassle, death is well above even that. 55 is - I believe - about the lifetime sweetspot. People always seem to be convinced that you should cool your hard drives to ambient if possible, but that is detrimental to their overall life (it's a mechanical part, lubrication doesn't function as well at cooler temperatures).

Now, that said, if you're having shutdown issues you may have a part that doesn't operate quite right... best thing you can do for suspected heat-related issues is get a Vantec Tornado and use it like a spotlight, cooling down individual components only until you find which one is causing the shutdown. For noise-related reasons, you won't want to use it 24/7, but I find it is great as a diagnostic tool to help identify heat-related OC bottlenecks and whatnot (very power, very concentrated in a small area).

[IanB]

It's worth remembering that hard disks have pretty tight tolerances for data placement on the platter, and they have moving metal parts which will expand with heat, so keeping them operating at a relatively similar temp to ambient has to be sensible. In the worst case, if the "normal" operating temperature is much hotter than ambient, and data is written when the drive is hot, then on startup from cold the heads could be far enough misaligned to prevent the tracks being read at all, causing data errors.

For my money, I'd rather keep drives cool to prevent data errors than worry about the minimal lubrication efficiency with excessive heat.

[Serra]

It's worth remembering that hard disks have pretty tight tolerances for data placement on the platter, and they have moving metal parts which will expand with heat, so keeping them operating at a relatively similar temp to ambient has to be sensible. In the worst case, if the "normal" operating temperature is much hotter than ambient, and data is written when the drive is hot, then on startup from cold the heads could be far enough misaligned to prevent the tracks being read at all, causing data errors.

For my money, I'd rather keep drives cool to prevent data errors than worry about the minimal lubrication efficiency with excessive heat.

This is a techno-myth. Sorry to have to bold that, but it's important that people understand this to improve the lifetime of their hard drives.

First off, the expansion of metal due to heat between 20 degrees (what we'll call ambient) and 50 degrees is extremely minimal... not enough to mess up anything.

More importantly though, platters are not actually made of solid metal anymore. They're actually made of a coated glass, which does not expand or contract with any impact meaningfully (ie. beyond what can be compensated for easily) with anything less than *significant* heat or cold.

Bottom line: Heat is NOT the enemy of your hard drive (well, within reason anyway)

[Polizei]

If you can believe it, may dad has had a Maxtor SATA 160GB in his Dell for over 6 years now, purring away at 50C almost all day, probably 12 hours a day.

[IanB]

This is a techno-myth.

...

More importantly though, platters are not actually made of solid metal anymore. They're actually made of a coated glass, which does not expand or contract with any impact meaningfully (ie. beyond what can be compensated for easily) with anything less than *significant* heat or cold.

OK, thanks for the updated info, but heat expansion or something with the exact same result was certainly a potential problem with older drives - I'm sure for a fact that I've known people with problems either booting drives from cold that had been running too hot, or who were getting read errors when their drives got hot (I remember having to sort out their non-existent case airflow to fix it). Not a myth for me.

[Rovtar]

This is a techno-myth. Sorry to have to bold that, but it's important that people understand this to improve the lifetime of their hard drives.

First off, the expansion of metal due to heat between 20 degrees (what we'll call ambient) and 50 degrees is extremely minimal... not enough to mess up anything.

More importantly though, platters are not actually made of solid metal anymore. They're actually made of a coated glass, which does not expand or contract with any impact meaningfully (ie. beyond what can be compensated for easily) with anything less than *significant* heat or cold.

Bottom line: Heat is NOT the enemy of your hard drive (well, within reason anyway)

in my case temp is problem..

temps on my hd disks is around 50°C
and i am now having vent blowing in it so i have now 30°C max and windows don't freeze any more...

[Serra]

If that's the case, I suggest a series of experiments. First, you'll need to identify whether your hard drive has been having any issues. Download a copy of PC Tune and do an error check (not a fast check though, I've seen that pass drives when the slower check didn't), and also check the health stats. If anything is flagged, then you can look more seriously at the hard drive. I would find it hard to believe the hard drive was responsible if those results come back healthy.

The next thing to do, regardless of the results, is to isolate components from one another and cool them off individually to determine whether it was the hard drive or another component getting too warm (ie. video card, north bridge), which I think is far more likely.

After that, I still insist that mechanically heat shouldn't be an issue at 50 degrees - a number of hard drive manufacturers suggest 55 as an operating temperature, so that really shouldn't be it. Now, if it's the electronics on it, you should find out now and have them replaced... if they're flaking out at 50 degrees, there's a good chance the drive will break down at some point and you might as well make it happen sooner than later for the RMA. Again though, I would suspect a different component first in this type of scenario... especially if whatever you're doing doesn't involve the hard drive at the time.

Edit: Also be sure to check RAM temperatures... a lot of WCers neglect to cool their RAM, and that will run you into problems. If possible, get a USB stick with memtest 86+ on it and have it run for a good long while to give that a check.

[stevecs]

I'll agree with Serra here, though with a caveat that drive temps >50C are not good for the longer-term health of the drive. You do not want drives running at ambient temperatures though 40-45C is pretty much the 'ideal' temperature. You can google for "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population" which is a white paper on the subject back in Feb 2007.