Safe hard drive temps?

[Platinum]

Ok so my main PCs motherboard died and im using my second PC which is housed in a Coolermaster Elite 340 MATX case, bunged in my 4870 and 3 hard drives (spaced out, one is in the CD bay under the DVD drive), problem is the drives are getting very hot, the one at the top hits 48 degrees and the middle boot drive hit 52 degrees when copying over the steam folder.
Question is, what is a safe temp for the drives?, Ordered a Zalman heatpipe cooler for the one on the CD bay which I am hoping will bring down the temps there, is there any kind of heatsink I can get for the boot drive in the 3.5" bay?
At some point im hoping to dremel out the fan holes and put grills on there to see if that helps the overall temps.
ATM I have to have my fans on medium and thats to loud.
CPU his 58 degrees under load and its a 45 watt AMD chip?, Swear I never got these temps when I ran a core 2 duo and a 8800 GT in a old MATX silverstone case which is essentialy the same design.

[Will404]

Thats too hot for a HDD, the warmest I have ever seen is about 40'C, and mine is about 23 ATM.

52!

[Platinum]

No space to put fans in front of them, one drive sits under the main drive cage and that gets some air from the intake fan and I have never seen that one go above 40 degrees.

[Platinum]

This might do the trick anyone tried one?

http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/pro...s/ita-kaze-hdd

[Will404]

That looks like it would do the trick, alternativly, you could strap a fan onto the back of the HDD cage, so that it is sucking air through it

[arthurleung]

My drives worked fine at 55'C back then bad I had problem getting proper airflow in my P180.
I think most of my external Seagate FreeAgent drives run more than 50'C 7x24 and there is no problem so far (touch wood).

[Biscuit]

Yeah i was never happy about it but my hard drives used to run 50+ 24/7 I dont tend to leave my computer on as much due to electricity costs so i dont have to deal with it anymore.

[Platinum]

That looks like it would do the trick, alternativly, you could strap a fan onto the back of the HDD cage, so that it is sucking air through it

Cant be done, the hard drives poke out from it as its so small, and then the CPU fan would get in the way.
Done what I can (Removed the dust filters from the drive covers as there made of mesh), turned the fans up, set the hard drives to power down after 10 mins), happier with the temps now, will see how the Zalman cooler performs

[Will404]

cool

[Platinum]

I will figure something out, dont want to go back to ATX , If only Scan could get the Elite 421 in that should sort my issues

[peterb]

There was research paper published into drive reliability, and one conclusion was t6hat drives that ran in the 35-25 C temperature range lasted longer than those run outside that range.

However if you go to the mfr's website, you can probably get the environmental data for your drive.

[moogle]

There was research paper published into drive reliability, and one conclusion was t6hat drives that ran in the 35-25 C temperature range lasted longer than those run outside that range.

However if you go to the mfr's website, you can probably get the environmental data for your drive.

Did the research paper say if outside that range means higher or lower?

[Emirzan]

I'm guessing the article being referred to is the google labs study on disk failure rates. See here

They concluded that disks both colder and hotter than the optimum temperature range were at greater risk of failure. So cooling your hard disks down into the 20's is totally pointless, doesn't seem to stop most people aspiring to this level of cooling though.

EDIT: probably a different article to the one peterb is discussing, the google one found an optimum temperature of around 36C

[moogle]

They concluded that disks both colder and hotter than the optimum temperature range were at greater risk of failure. So cooling your hard disks down into the 20's is totally pointless, doesn't seem to stop most people aspiring to this level of cooling though.

Cool. I can't help when mine are in the low 20's but that means I don't need a fan to cool them then
I just assumed colder = better.

[Platinum]

Yea pretty much been known for a long time that cooler running drives last longer, thats why the old "Deathstars" used to fail, they just got to hot.

[peterb]

Did the research paper say if outside that range means higher or lower?

Both - too cool and too hot both affected drive life

I'm guessing the article being referred to is the google labs study on disk failure rates. See here

They concluded that disks both colder and hotter than the optimum temperature range were at greater risk of failure. So cooling your hard disks down into the 20's is totally pointless, doesn't seem to stop most people aspiring to this level of cooling though.

EDIT: probably a different article to the one peterb is discussing, the google one found an optimum temperature of around 36C

No that was the one - just couldn't remember the temps (and too busy to look it up )