Study Finds That Humidity Has More Effect On Drive Failures Than Temperature (rackcdn.com)

AmiMoJo writes: A study by Rutgers University and Microsoft has found that hard drives are more prone to failure due to high levels of humidity [PDF] than high temperature. With a view to 'free cooling' data centres (using low external air temperature for cooling to save power), the paper notes that humidity related malfunctions of the driver controller / adapter are the dominant cause of drive failure. The good news is that while the researchers found that high relative humidity was a significant factor in drive failures, "[S]oftware availability techniques can mask them and enable freecooled operation, resulting in significantly lower infrastructure and energy costs that far outweigh the cost of the extra component failures."

Comments

Re:That's actually pretty surprising.

[Anonymous Coward]

The relative humidity is a little less meaningful that everyone thinks. What matters is the availability of moisture to contribute to the corrosion process.

Put another way, for a given starting point of temperature and humidity, raising the temperature decreases the relative humidity, but not the absolute humidity. It is not true that warmer air that is less saturated will "suck" moisture from an area with a lower *relative* humidity if the *absolute* humidity is the same. Osmotic influences work on absolute concentration.

You have to actually remove moisture from the environment, reducing the absolute humidity. Increasing temperature by itself is actually bad, because the environment can accommodate a higher absolute humidity and therefore higher availability of water to contribute to corrosion.

The best environment for electronics is cool and dry - cool so there is less availability of the atmosphere to absorb moisture, and dry for reasons already discussed.

-GP