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How long do hard drives actually live for?

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xtabber:
Backblaze has a new report that shows absolutely no correlation between drive temperature and failure, based on  data they collected from 34,000 hard drives.

In other words, keeping drives cool does nothing to keep them running longer.

mouser:
that is pretty darn important news if true -- for the last few years i've been operating under the belief that keeping hard drives cool was my #1 priority -- and that this would dictate buying more expensive cases, and running tools to display and alert hard drive temperatures in the system tray where i could keep an eye on them.

IainB:
^^ Yes, when I read that news, I immediately wondered what your reaction to the report might be. It's suggesting a kinda non-intuitive or unconventional conclusion in the report (i.e., not in line with conventional wisdom), but it doesn't necessarily flat-out contradict conventional wisdom.
Me, I could only see that it was inconclusive as to what the actual provable causes of hard drive (disk surface) deterioration/failure were - they will probably be found to be a little more complex than just heat. I mean, for example, what about other things, such as (say) the effect of the earth's magnetic field?

You know, where you say that "i've been operating under the belief that...", I really would recommend caution.
From hard-won personal experience, it will be the "belief" thing that gets you every time. As a recent example, for several years I had been operating under/in the belief that I could trust a business partner implicitly and without question, only to recently discover (last month) that she had stolen $19,400 from our partnership in 2007 right at the start of our partnership. She covered it up with an old trick - she put herself in charge of the accounts administration and filed away all the bank statements that would have revealed the theft by showing her syphoning off the funds in increments every month over a 13-month period, so I never saw them.
Talk about gullible. I feel so embarrassed for being trusting dumb.    :-[

It was an incredibly dumb thing for my partner to do though, so I also completely misjudged her intellectual and ethical capacity, let alone her character.

40hz:
No correlation with heat? Now that is really interesting...

I wonder, however, if there's a missing factor at work since Backblaze is operating in a climate-controlled data center environment with what I'd suspect is cleaner and better regulated power.

Are the ambient heat levels or fluctuations similar to those experienced in a less controlled environment? I'm wondering if they've engineered an environment such that heat doesn't factor significantly in drive failure - which might suggest it's not just heat, but heat plus an additional factor  - or factors.

Yup. This is getting real interesting.

mouser:
I wonder, however, if there's a missing factor at work since Backblaze is operating in a climate-controlled data center environment with what I'd suspect is cleaner and better regulated power.
--- End quote ---


ding ding ding! i think we have a winner.

look at the chart on that page:


and we have this comment: " And almost all of the drives are in the nice comfortable range from 15˚ to 30˚."

SO.. it looks like the lesson is, IF YOUR DRIVES ARE ALWAYS RUNNING RELATIVELY COOL, trying to run them cooler won't improve reliability.

But this doesn't at all address the danger of running drives at warm temperature ranges like above 36 degrees or so.

So... Since my drives are running currently at 36,37,32 with no load and in mild weather, and i used to regularly see drive temps of 45 or more, it seems my paranoia of watching my drive temperatures are still warranted.

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