Hard drive - how cold is too cold ?

swbruce21

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Jan 14, 2011
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I have a Thinkpad T42 in the basement of a vacation home that provides a remote access Web Application for accessing heating, lighting control and security controls. The home is unnoccupied in the winter and the basement gets down to 50 degrees F. I have software logging hard drive temperature. The drive runs at a constant 12-14 C because it is never really doing anything.

I just read Google's massive study that shows that failure rates on hard-drives is statistically about 3 times higher when the drive is at 25 C rather than the optimum 40 C during their first 2 years. They had no data below 25C. The cooler temperature causes more failures at all ages, but less so after 2 years of service.

(40+- was statistically the best temperature at all ages according to the google study. They use 1000's of comsumer class drives of mixed brands on the servers that store the Google search cache)

So, I am concerned that 12C might be really bad for the drive. Extending Google results It looks like I might expect a 30% annual chance of failure at this temperature on this new drive. Does anybody have any knowledge or experience about running so cool. On the plus side, the cpu fan never runs and the cpu is 33C. I was hoping for a long life un-attended system with a no-fans web server.
 
Solution
I doubt anyone has better data here than Google. You can stick an SSD in there if you are really worried, except I dont think there are any ATA SSDs, and the T42 is ATA drive.

If the laptop is running fine there now, all of a sudden worrying about it won't make it fail any faster. Just make a ghost image of the drive, buy a stock of spare 20 gig ATA drives for like 10-20 each, and replace as it fails.
I doubt anyone has better data here than Google. You can stick an SSD in there if you are really worried, except I dont think there are any ATA SSDs, and the T42 is ATA drive.

If the laptop is running fine there now, all of a sudden worrying about it won't make it fail any faster. Just make a ghost image of the drive, buy a stock of spare 20 gig ATA drives for like 10-20 each, and replace as it fails.
 
Solution

swbruce21

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Jan 14, 2011
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Taking your suggestion, I maintain Windows 7 system-images now, but I should stock up on drives while they are still availabe. With no fans running and in a constant cool state and mounted to a wall, I am thinking the T42 could go forever except for the hard drive.

The down-side of home automation is the need to have a tech who knows the systems in use after the home goes to the next owner. That's why I am looking for permanance . . to match the service life of the systems this PC controls.