How does high temperature affect your HDDs?

Importance of HDD temperature control

The internal temperature of a hard drive is an important factor not only in its correct functioning but also when it comes to the reliability and lifetime of a storage system. The mechanical components of the hard disk drive, especially the fluid-dynamic bearing of the platter-stack spindle, wear out faster at higher temperatures as the fluid oil leaks out at a faster rate. So, controlling the temperature of hard drives in storage systems is necessary to ensure optimal functionality and high reliability.

How to measure the hard drive temperature

Modern hard drives have a built-in internal temperature sensor, which can be read via the S.M.A.R.T parameter, by tools within the operating system, or by the management tools of the host bus adapter or RAID controller. Open-E JovianDSS GUI provides access to management tools of Broadcom and Microchip-Adaptec management tools.
• In case of Microchip-Adaptec: <node-ip-address>:8443,
login with aac, password raid
• In case of Broadcom: <node-ip-address>:9000, login with
root, password admin

By expanding controller-, enclosure-, and port-view, the connected hard disk drives are listed and temperature is displayed. On the operating system level, smart values can be read out with “smartmontools”, a common freeware tool available for windows and Linux.

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