So I noticed that Seagate external drives have a tendency to suffer performance degradation with large back ups. For example, I had a 5TB drive that would start a backup at 130MB/s but then it would slowly drop to 1MB/s. This was extremely frustrating, causing backups to take days instead of hours.
Looking at the SMART data turned up a possible culprit: temperatures. Copying multiple terabytes of files seemed to cause the drive to exceed design spec, and presumably throttle to keep from melting into a puddle of slag.
Fast forward to today when I was trying to restore an image to Macbook. Copying started out at the expected 30MB/s (only had a USB 2 cable handy), but fairly quickly dropped to 13MB/s with an ETA of four hours. Thinking about my past experience with overheating Seagate drives (yes this was a 1TB Seagate Expansion Drive) I decided to increase the cooling surface area. I put the drive on its side, and within minutes the ETA dropped from four hours to 1 hr 50 min and copy speed shot up to 20MB/s.
Am I smoking crack? Is there any possibility this āweird trickā actually works?
Totally reasonable assumption.
I have a 8TB WD drive that i shucked, before i shucked it i tested it in the original enclosure and it would idle at 60C (after warming up) and during a big transfer would get into the 70ās and performance wasnāt great. i blamed it on the USB cable but it may have been the temperature.
The drive runs better in the case but it still idleās 10C higher then any other drive in my system.
It is not that far off to assume based on that, that when a drive reaches a high mark close to or over those temperatures, it would start to throttle down (just like your CPU, GPU, etc. would)
So yes, maintaining a proper temperature of your drive(s) can help maintain their more optimal speeds
What gets my knickers in a twist is that these drives are being used as intended (i.e. full system backups.) Shouldnāt they be designed with proper cooling for their intended purpose?
EDIT: 15 years or so ago I remember that my company had a Fantom external drive with a fan. Yet today I never see external drives with active coolingā¦
Temps are only part of the performance drop, if a drive uses shingled recording itāll cache/write to a fast ātemp spotā then shingle record it for a full block as part of the optimal storage-you see less fragmentation as a result. On a Firecuda 2TB I use for mobile game storage, its amazing how the shingled recording kept the fragmentation extremely low compared to a normal desktop(non-shingled)ā¦ random I/O is bad but the 8GB cache has its benefits.
In my experience it really depends upon the Seagate external drive series, their expansion series has poor air flow as some of the vents arenāt even punched out and are just about design looks and they must be standing vertical to stay under 70C.
BackupPlus series has actual air holes, however 90% of the drives they use are shingled recording and some drives are actually Seagate Archive series drives which are 5200 RPM.
Canāt say much about WD external drives, I mostly avoid the MyBook series as they use encryption built-into the SATA-USB bridge so if the enclosure goes bad your data is stuck.
Whilst I agree with you, I can think of a multitude of reasons why active cooling isnāt the case anymore with external drives.
The noise
People really donāt accept it when they can hear a fan when a competing model/manufacturer doesnāt. Keep in mind that the average user doesnāt know or necessarily care why the fan turns on in the first place.
Decreased BOM (Bill of Material)
No fan = less parts = less cost to manufacture, and also
Decreased defects
As fans tend to go bad (if not properly maintained over time; as in cleaned etc.) simply not installing a fan means no fan to break (I am aware of this failed logic, but manufacturers look at cost first and foremost) Replacing a few units that maybe break because of lack of cooling versus placing fans in all units usually (they hope/calculate) means they would lose money in the later scenario.
"The user should ensure proper cooling"
I wouldnāt be surprised if manufacturers would argue that it is up to the user to ensure that the surrounding area/environment is maintained at a pleasant temperature for the drive(s) to dissipate their heat. As A/C is become more and more common, wellā¦
Most (continuous) backups only have a high-burst at the beginning
Once the initial backup is done, the amount of additional data being recorded tends to be less - so the heat buildup is less likely to occur as there is less for the drive to do. So after that one time, it probably wonāt happen to heat up so much again. (Based on how the average user sets their backup in my personal experience)
Most people donāt really care how long it takes to backup as they do it at night/low use times
Speaks for itself; usually backups are done at times when the user is not actively using their computer (again, speaking of the average user)
This is just what I can think of, but the gist of it is āIn most events, it either doesnāt matter or (most of) the user/users wonāt careā.
As SSDās are becoming more and more common place, and prices (in general) are falling - the spinning disk variant of drives will eventually fade away. Now I am aware that SSDās are absolutely not cooler - but they usually are smaller. So while maintaining the same size of the entire package (disk+enclosure), more surface-area can be dedicated to cooling (for example) which was previously dedicated to the drive itself.
Absolutely not. Even HDDs slow down due to temperature and cooling them down may keep the sustained performance higher for longer (unless youāre saturating the cache faster than it can be finalized on the disk). To add to this HDDs are more susceptible to temperature changes so the cooler they are during their lifespan, the longer they will last.
^ this is playing russian roulette with hard drives. Whoever made the enclosure just said fuck it, whoever is gonna buy it is gonna deal with their data being lost.
@PaintChips I avoid Seagate if I can help it at all. Hereās Louis Rossman talking about how often he sees Seagate drives in his drive recovery business:
All the Seagates Iāve inherited have had very poor airflow, and Iāll see SMART temps up to 60C. When I buy them for myself Iāve been getting G-Technology drives like these:
No active cooling, but it does have an aluminum heatsink to carry heat away from the drive. The all-metal chassis also helps get rid of excess heat. And they do not encrypt the drive contents, apparently unlike WDās main line of external drives.
It was weird not to see any number in your original topic post. So, Iām not accepting your anecdotal evidence
The transfer drop maybe be caused by fragmentation/SMR housekeeping too.
Convection is not enough for sufficient cooling, as pointed out, the WD Elements/MyBook plastic external enclosures are awful. Even if you remove the entire side cover - itās not enough to keep the temp <40Ā°C (my personal preference).
Similarly, convection on a bare drive will be barely noticable (unless its lying on the floor?)
Aluminium enclosures are probably fine for up to 4-6 hours use (depends on radiation ability, ambient temp), I decided to plug in an internal case fan whenever I have to do long transfers.
