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I have 3 hard drives inside my Antec Sonata III 500 case. I have 1 Seagate 7200.10 250GB hard drive, a Samsung F3 1GB drive, and a 500GB seagate 7200.10 hard drive. All 7200rpm

I have an external 2GB Samsung 5400rpm drive.

I'm finding that the 250GB seagate consistently sits around 50-55 C when the cover is on, when I take the case cover off, it hovers around 50. The 1GB Samsung and 500GB Seagate sits around 41 w/ cover off, and 45 w/ cover on.

The external sits around 40 consistently.

Normal heating at cooling in my house, temp kept at 72F or below.

Are these internal temps too high for my drives? I'm thinking about getting a bigger case with better airflow bc of it. Thoughts?

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Seagate specs almost all their drives at 60c for a max operating temp (source: Seagate datasheet). So 41-50 should be no problem. Getting towards the 55 degree mark is more worrying but I would imagine that Seagate will deliberately make the upper limit artificially lower to encourage users to keep more within the 'safe zone'.

You could also look at this article from a study by Google for optimal HDD temperatures over long periods of time.

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up vote 4 down vote

Jeff Atwood already asked himself the same question a while ago: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/12/hard-drive-temperatures-be-afraid.html

His conclussion:

"Hard drive temperature is arguably the most important temperature to monitor in your computer. If you regularly see temperatures of 45C or higher on your drive, consider improving airflow in your case. If you don't, you've substantially increased your risk of hard drive failure or data loss."

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That blog entry was written before the Google study (see Mark's answer), which rather says that not to be afraid of hot hard disks. They're fallible anyway, so you need to be prepared for failure (i.e. back up) regardless of the temperature. The unsourced “According to our research” quote, which is likely bogus (advertising copy from a cooler vendor?), and the glaring nonsense of “heat disproportionate to the power input”, don't encourage me to take any of it seriously. – Gilles Nov 9 '10 at 20:56
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up vote 2 down vote

Use HDD Life it uses S.M.A.R.T and shows normal temperature for your HD. Airflow on and under your HD is important. Regardless how many fans you have check out that you have the flow at right position.

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Won't I get the same readings from HD Tune? Or the CPUz Hardware Monitor software? – zm15 Nov 9 '10 at 16:37
If they support S.M.A.R.T you will probably get right values. – Amir Rezaei Nov 9 '10 at 16:40
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up vote 1 down vote

I have a similar setup: an Antec SOLO case and two Seagate 7200.10 1TB hard-drives plus two other 7200RPM hard-drives.

In the summer there are at least 32-35 Celsius degrees outside, and the air from the house probably has at least 27℃ (I don't have an air conditioner). The temperature of my hard drives is around 41℃ and in some rare occasions they might reach 45℃, but that's it, nothing more.

I would suggest installing a fan in the front of the case. I have two 80mm Antec Tricool fans set to medium and, as you can see, they make a difference.

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