What IS reasonable disk drive temperature?

[Thomas Cameron]

On Mon, 2005-06-13 at 04:12 +0200, Alexander Dalloz wrote:
> Am Mo, den 13.06.2005 schrieb Jim Cornette um 3:43:
> 
> > This program should be sufficient for the purpose. Is 46 Degrees C hot 
> > for a light duty installation? The drives in the environment that they 
> > are used are constanlty performing read/write operations and are powered 
> > on 24/7
> 
> > Jim
> > 
> > Installed: hddtemp.i386 0:0.3-0.4.beta13
> > Complete!
> > 
> > hddtemp /dev/hda
> > /dev/hda: IC25N040ATCS04-0: 46°C
> 
> 46°C is too much in my opinion. It is not that bad that you very quickly
> will have problems but the temperature will massively lower the drive's
> lifetime. I suggest you do a better cooling. Place a 80mm fan in front
> of the harddrive(s). That helps a lot. 30°C - 35°C are values which mean
> a good condition.

I've got a system with 7 IBM 36BG Ultra 160 SCSI drives in it.  I've got
FOUR 80mm fans (two in front and two in back), and the drives still run
hot (from 46 to 56 degrees C).

They have always run hotter than I'd like, no matter what I do.  I'm
being sort of fatalistic about it - they've lasted several years running
like that, so it they die, I'm just going to write them off and probably
wind up getting a SATA 250GB drive which will run nearly as fast
(150MB/s as opposed to 160MB/s) and use a lot less power.

Thomas