Effects of High Temperatures on HDDs
StorageNewsletter.com, Friday, November 10,2023
Modern enterprise HDDs are designed for operating temperatures between 5 and 60 degrees C. Manufacturers recommend that they should not be operated at the upper end of this range on a permanent basis because doing so will reduce the lifetime of the drives and pose a risk of higher failure rates. So what happens to HDDs at high temperatures? And can these effects be compensated for later by operating at lower temperatures?
Like most components in servers and storage systems, HDDs get warmer in operation, especially under heavy load. To enable administrators to monitor the temperature of their drives, modern units have an internal temperature sensor that delivers its readings via SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology), so that they can be read using on-board operating system resources, system management tools or the tools for managing RAID controllers and host bus adapters. In addition, there are a whole host of specialist tools for this task, such as the open-source licensed smartmontoolsh, available for both Windows and Linux.