Lowest temperature for hard drives? - page 2.

bcpokey

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Quote from: tacotime on November 25, 2012, 11:47:21 PM

I'm in North Alberta

Okay, thanks. I guess I'll have to wrap some kind of insulating material around it to keep it warm. Hopefully the motherboard won't cold bug at those temps either (right now the northbridge is 30C and the memory is 12C).

That's ri-dicu-cold. Why not take your rigs inside to help heat your home?

Interestingly, it's actually a pretty good idea to insulate your drives to keep them a bit warmer:

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf

Drives between 15-30C fail at a higher rate than 30-40C almost across the board.

tacotime

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I'm in North Alberta

Okay, thanks. I guess I'll have to wrap some kind of insulating material around it to keep it warm. Hopefully the motherboard won't cold bug at those temps either (right now the northbridge is 30C and the memory is 12C).

crazyates

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Holy crap where do you live?!

We had a trick for recovering data from old hard drives with wheel bearings (which aren't in use anymore, most spinners now use some sort of fluid bearing) where if the bearing had frozen, sometimes we could put them in the freezer overnight. Get them down -10 or 0C, and plug them in really quick and see if we could read the drive. 16C for a hard drive is fine, but i'm not sure about continuously running the drive below freezing.

deepceleron

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I just looked up a Deskstar datasheet, and it specifies 5C to 60C operating, -40 to 70C non-operating. WD Caviar is 0-60C operating. Looks like it would be best to not freeze your hard drive.

It sounds like if the fans stop working, that would actually be what you want to keep the system warm...

tacotime

legendary

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My rigs are outside here. Right now it's -24C outside and my rig's hard drive is running at 16C (my CPU amazingly is at 12C).

My question whether or not the hard drive will stop working below a certain temperature? It's get into -40 to -50C here and it's possible that the HDD temperature will go below 0C.

Also at what temperature do brushless fans (on the video cards/CPU) generally stop working?

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