Do hard drives need active cooling?

[LimitedWard]

I have a western digital blue 1TB hard drive, and I plan on putting it into a Corsair Carbide Air 240. The Air 240 has a dual chamber design, leaving the 3.5 HDD bay on the side with no case fans. I know that most cases have fans blowing over the hard drives from the front.

Do hard drives need active cooling? Does it shorten a hard drive's life span if they do not have fans blowing on them?

 

[i7Baby]

Hard Drives have a pretty wide temp range that they can run in. But you shouldn't let them get too hot or too cold. A fan helps assure this.

 

[RElectrons]

According to Google (https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf) the temperature is very important. See pages 5 and 6.

Anything below 26 deg C is VERY BAD. Anything over 43 dec C is a little bad.

In other words, keep it at 79 deg F or higher.

 

[i7Baby]

Similar here - http://www.buildcomputers.net/hdd-temperature.html

 

[LimitedWard]

Hard Drives have a pretty wide temp range that they can run in. But you shouldn't let them get too hot or too cold. A fan helps assure this.

According to Google (https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf) the temperature is very important. See pages 5 and 6.

Anything below 26 deg C is VERY BAD. Anything over 43 dec C is a little bad.

In other words, keep it at 79 deg F or higher.

Hmm.. I wonder, is it possible to mount a fan to a hard drive bay? Perhaps a 90mm fan in one of the slots?

 

[Lutfij]

Do hard drives need active cooling? Does it shorten a hard drive's life span if they do not have fans blowing on them?

LimitedWard,
If HDD's needed active cooling then the world of watercooling would have been flooded with waterblocks for hard drives. In short, no, you don't need active cooling and the long answer would be; The corsair Air 240 has the HDD's tray mounted in a such a way that all drives in the caddy are vertically placed - that would allow for passive heat dissipation (based on the stack effect) and the warm air would naturally be ventilated through the back via the meshed/perforated rear HDD cover.

For the second part of your question,
having a fan blowing on the HDD doesn't ensure longevity. You have drive activity and platter wear and tear to consider (the amount of data read/write performed on a daily basis as well as its operating periods) and most often a harddrive can and will malfunction (at any given period even though brand new) as it is a mechanical device. In terms of engineering, moving parts = failure points

Unless you have WD Velociraptor Drives (which have a heat spreader of their own for said drives insane rpm's) you have nothing to worry about and this eventually will lead me to ask - what sort of drives do you have? 5400, 5900, 7200, 10000 or 15000 rpm drives?

 

[LimitedWard]

Do hard drives need active cooling? Does it shorten a hard drive's life span if they do not have fans blowing on them?

LimitedWard,
If HDD's needed active cooling then the world of watercooling would have been flooded with waterblocks for hard drives. In short, no, you don't need active cooling and the long answer would be; The corsair Air 240 has the HDD's tray mounted in a such a way that all drives in the caddy are vertically placed - that would allow for passive heat dissipation (based on the stack effect) and the warm air would naturally be ventilated through the back via the meshed/perforated rear HDD cover.

For the second part of your question,
having a fan blowing on the HDD doesn't ensure longevity. You have drive activity and platter wear and tear to consider (the amount of data read/write performed on a daily basis as well as its operating periods) and most often a harddrive can and will malfunction (at any given period even though brand new) as it is a mechanical device. In terms of engineering, moving parts = failure points

Unless you have WD Velociraptor Drives (which have a heat spreader of their own for said drives insane rpm's) you have nothing to worry about and this eventually will lead me to ask - what sort of drives do you have? 5400, 5900, 7200, 10000 or 15000 rpm drives?

It's a WD Blue 7200rpm drive. I've never heard of the stack effect before. That's actually pretty cool!

 

[Lutfij]

Its a nifty thing! The Arabs used it when they needed natural ventilation(cooling and aeration for their villa's) in the desert with their windcathcer designs... necessity is the mother of invention.

As per the drive, breath easy mate - your drive isn't going to burn itself. Mind you, the Blue's were designed to perform faster than their Greens but not heat up like the Black's. If you're looking for higher capacity storage options, the Red and/or Green series of drives will be good while having an SSD to take care of your speedy bootup and app loading times would be preferred. This is with WD in mind, you have other options from Toshiba, Hitachi and Seagate as well.