I can’t find any information or consensus on how bad this kind of temperature is for hard disks. Was setting up a backup server and set the supermicro bmc fan control to optimal, which decided to turn off the fans behind the hard drive since the rest of the system was doing fine (wtf? Is this normal?). It was probably like this for 3-4 hours since I was remoting into it rather than doing things on the monitor. I checked and it gave some temp warnings, so I used smartctl -a /dev/sdwhatever and saw that a disk was at around 68c and shut it off immediately. Cooled down the disks and set fan control to full speed and now they are at a relatively normal 43c.
Consumers drives are probably not too happy about that temp but enterprise should at least survive for a short period of time how ever it will shorten lifespan quite a bit at those temps and it’s usually out of spec (most enterprise drives can do ~55-60C tops ambient during operation).
Yeah I figured. No real data anywhere on this that would give me estimates for how much it would shorten the lifespan unfortunately. I wonder if there is a study on this out there anywhere, because I would love to see it.
If it was running like that for weeks I’d be agitated at finding out, but a few hours? No big deal. If it was so fragile (platters warping or demagnetizing or something), you’d already be seeing problems.
It’s actually colder temperatures that are/were bad for HDDs. A few things to note:
Drives at that time typically had a lower rated operating temp than today, something like 50-55C operating. Most modern drives are rated at 60C. I think I recall seeing some with a 65C rating before.
The drives in question were operating at roughly that temperature constantly
While the graph cuts off at 52C, even if it skyrocketed back up, I’d be willing to bet where you end up is no worse than running cold (though I suspect modern HDD drives are better at that as well, having an operating temperature down to 5C now).