What IS reasonable disk drive temperature?

[Claude Jones]

On Sat June 11 2005 9:45 pm, Neal Rhodes wrote:
> Ksensors reports temperature of a dual IDE drive mirrored system as about
> 114F on most days.    That seems to be within the manufacturers specs.
> Is that reasonable for long term health of drive?
>

Neal: I manage a network of nearly 50 pc's in my corporate world. Some of 
these machines are extremely high data rate video editing machines, others 
servers. We've been having a rash of drive failures of late, mostly external 
USB's with Maxtor drives, but also many internal drives, mostly Maxtors, have 
been going bad. Heat is the biggest source of problems - the USB externals by 
and large don't have fans, and if you take the things apart, you find cables 
that have turned brown from the heat. It's a huge problem with the video  
editing machines because they have to sustain extremely high data rates over 
long periods of time. All this by way of saying that heat is your enemy. 114F 
may be within some spec, but that's too hot. My video machine drives run cool 
to the touch, and the ones that have temp sensors are mostly running in the 
70-80F range. We spend a lot of effort on making sure that all our machines 
have tons of cooling. We shop cases that have extra fan mounts, especially 
for the drive cages. You may get away with it, but you're courting long term 
problems. That's been my experience. Last September, our corporate firewall 
drive burnt out --- now that was a scramble, and a long story. 

-- 
Claude Jones
Bluemont, VA, USA