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I think my server might not be a fan of the upcoming heatwave (feddit.org)
submitted 1 year ago* by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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The sensor is located on the case (not near the exhaust) of the server. With the structure of my appartment this is the only place I can realistically put my Server but sadly also the hottest place in my appartment.

The outside temperature is supposed to reach 36°C today so I expect the ambient temp for the server to rise another 2-3 degrees.

Homessistant plot showing the temperature the last few days. It started at 30.8°C yesterday and has been rising since to now 31.5°C.
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[–] 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

31.5°C also is just a bit slower at cooling, and computer devices easily reach 95°C without any troubles.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Hard drives don't really like high temperatures for extended periods of time. Google did some research on this way back when. Failure rates start going up at an average temperature of 35 °C and become significantly higher if the HDD is operated beyond 40°C for much of its life. That's HDD temperature, not ambient.

    The same applies to low temperatures. The ideal temperature range seems to be between 20 °C and 35 °C.

    Mind you, we're talking "going from a 5% AFR to a 15% AFR for drives that saw constant heavy use in a datacenter for three years". Your regular home server with a modest I/O load is probably going to see much less in terms of HDD wear. Still, heat amplifies that wear.

    I'm not too concerned myself despite the fact that my server's HDD temps are all somewhere between 41 and 44. At 30 °C ambient there's not much better I can do and the HDDs spend most of their time idling anyway.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Google did some research on this way back when. Failure rates start going up at an average temperature of 35 °C and become significantly higher if the HDD is operated beyond 40°C for much of its life. That's HDD temperature, not ambient.

    On the contrary, they found that temperature had almost no bearing on failure rate.

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

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    To quote that same document:

    Figure 5 looks at the average temperatures for different age groups. The distributions are in sync with Figure 4 showing a mostly flat failure rate at mid-range temperatures and a modest increase at the low end of the temperature distribution. What stands out are the 3 and 4-year old drives, where the trend for higher failures with higher temperature is much more constant and also more pronounced.

    That's what I referred to. I don't see a total age distribution for their HDDs so I have no idea if they simply didn't have many HDDs in the three-to-four-years range, which would explain how they didn't see a correlation in the total population. However, they do show a correlation between high temperatures and AFR for drives after more than three years of usage.

    My best guess is that HDDs wear out slightly faster at temperatures above 35-40 °C so if your HDD is going to die of an age-related problem it's going to die a bit sooner if it's hot. (Also notice that we're talking average temperature so the peak temperatures might have been much higher).

    In a home server where the HDDs spend most of their time idling (probably even below Google's "low" usage bracket) you probably won't see a difference within the expected lifespan of the HDD. Still, a correlation does exist and it might be prudent to have some HDD cooling if temps exceed 40 °C regularly.

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