What's Worse for Hard Drives: Heat or Vibration?

gottabeme asks: "I turned on my computer the other day and all of a sudden the BIOS said the S.M.A.R.T. status was "Bad: backup and replace." The drive has continued working in PIO mode (instead of DMA) long enough for me to get a new drive and copy everything over. When I finished copying and put the new drive in the cage where the old one was, I realized that the fan at the front of the cage which was keeping the drive cool to the touch was causing a fair amount of vibration to be transferred to the hard drive. The other 7200rpm drive without a fan was pretty warm, but had no vibration at all. The bad drive is only a few years old, and I've never had a drive fail on me in around 10 years of computer use, until now. And until I got this case and drive I'd never had a fan blowing on a drive before. Who knows what caused the problem, but all this has made me wonder: Which is worse for a hard drive? Heat that's fairly warm to the touch, or constant vibration from a case fan right next to it? Any readers care to offer their experiences and knowledge?"

Comments

Solution: Don't use front fans

[Tuxinatorium]

A single 120mm fan, or two 80mm fans in the back, in addition to the power supply fans, are enough to provide plenty of air circulation and keep everything well below temperature tolerances, unless your case's front ventilation passages suck. I don't understand why the heck people try and put 5 or 6 loud fans in their case to drop the operating temperatures from 34 degrees to 30 degrees when the damn things were made to operate up to and above 50 degrees.

PS: For those who can't grasp the obvious, yes, I'm talking celcius here. The Imperial system should be abolished because it's so damn inefficient to work with. But that's another rant for another day.

Heat or Vibration? Neither!

[0x0d0a]

5400 RPM drives -- avoid both the heat *and* vibration problems.

Re:My experience has been heat

[neitzsche]

Also, any time a hard drive is at an angle from level that isn't 0 or 90 degrees that is very bad.

I agree! I once mounted a 40GB drive 180 degrees (in the last possible space in a small case) instead of just buying a new case. It died in about a month, I presume due to the grease settling the wrong way, and no longer lubricating the bearings, indirectly increasing the heat.

So these days, I won't mount a hard drive at 90 degrees either. It's worth $60 for a new case, to ensure they are mounted at 0 degrees.

Superstitions

[dpbsmith]

Drives fail because the interactions of the marketplace and the technology seem to have equilibrated on drives that are cheap and unreliable. The failures occur for a variety of reasons. Some are known to the manufacturer but won't be disclosed to you. Some are _discovered_ by the manufacturer (bad batches of parts) and _certainly_ won't be disclosed to you until so many fail that it becomes a public scandal.

From the end-user's point of view, it's all random and there's not much that can be done about it.

You can't convince me that a well-engineered drive has such a thin margin of safety that it will have a long life at 70 degrees and fail frequently at 80 degrees. (If temperature is that much MORE critical for drives than for other components, then why don't PC's have better cooling systems and overtemperature warnings? And why are they designed to let drives be mounted in close proximity to each other?)

You can't convince me that a drive that is doing so many seeks that it is making fizzing, buzzing head-seeking noises most of the day, creating its OWN vibrations) is going to drop dead because the fan next to it isn't vibration-free.

Because the mind abhors a knowledge vacuum, we all create our own superstitions about drive life. OUR drives won't fail because WE (pick one) a) keep our systems powered 24 hours a day to prevent power-on stress, b) religiously turn off our systems when not in use to keep down operating hours, c) open the case and vacuum out dust and clean air filters every 60 days, d) NEVER open the case because it's human handling that does the mischief, etc. etc.

Don't blame the victim. Drives just fail and it's not your fault.