9262, Maxed out hard drive temps under a brutal test thrashing

For anyone who might benefit, here are some burn in test results on hard drive temps for a 9262 configured with 3 independant hard drives. The tests were performed with the hard drive bay door REMOVED and tape placed over the bay opening to simulate a ventilated replacement door with at least 50% ventilation. (More on this later)

The drives I put in my 9262 and tested for thermal performance are 3 western digital scorpio black labels 160Gb. I ran bert's stuff test software to thrash the hard drives with long running continuous writes, and read operations. Fans were left in the AUTO position, but ran high most of the time because I was simultaneously stressing all four cores of the CPU with PRIME95 (3 instances) and 1 instance of Orthos to test RAM, at the same time as the hard drive stressing.

Max temps reached under this brutal punishment over a 24 hour period (ambient temp max 72 F) were good, but above the 60 C max operating temp for these WD drives

During WRITE operations:
Drive (0) - 62 C
Drive (1) - 58 C
Drive (2) - 63 C

During READ operations:
Drive (0) - 61 C
Drive (1) - 58 C
Drive (2) - 63 C


DO NOT DO THIS TEST WITH THE DRIVE BAY COVERED, AND USE NOTEBOOK HARDWARE CONTROL SOFTWARE TO PUT A SAFETY SHUTDOWN AT MAX DRIVE OPERATING TEMP + 10% if you feel compelled to torture your machine.

During normal use I have never seen temps reach these levels, but perhaps some gaming software might get there. It's nice to know that there is a max for these drives in this chassis, that is less than 10% over what the mfg would like to see for operating temps, IF THE HARD DRIVE COVER CAN BE VENTILATED 50%.

I do not expect during normal usage (the way I use my laptop) I will ever see these high temps again, even with the hard drive bay cover on.

But if I do see high temps, it's nice to know the max runaway temps are not that high and a well fabricated replacement hard drive bay cover with 50% ventilation will probably be all that is needed

 

I've had higher temperatures on that with my SeaGate 200GB 7,200 RPM at full load... 71 degrees Celcius actually (when next to my Toshiba 320GB 5,400 RPM drive). It runs at 62 degrees Celcius by itself (with the Toshiba drive under the battery bay) at full load. I had to move it to avoid the 70+ temperatures I was getting. The Toshiba drive, however, runs at 42 degrees Celcius at full load.

 

That's why i picked wd scorpio black, low power (low generated heat), but still arguably fastest mechanical laptop drives in world. I ordered the 9262 with the low cost 5400rpm 320gb but I can't recall the brand at the moment. I did not really care, because i disk imaged it over to one of the wd drives, put the 3 wd's in the laptop, reformatted the 5400rpm, and put it in my coolmax external hard drive enclosure, as my backup drive for data... I think it was a toshiba

If you use berts stuff to torture test that toshiba drive, you will send it's temp much higher i expect. Heavy use of the laptop is nothing compared to what test software does to a drive

 

nice stuff. love those WD HDDs you got there.. also good to see that the drive(1) doesn't really block air flow to drive(2)..

 

my hdd once hit 71 degree celcius too during a virus scan. When this happened I was asleep, I make sure to turn off my laptop at nite now... and I too have the seagate 200gb 7200rpm,

 

Whats the point? To see who can fry there HD's quicker.

 

Yeah, the 320GB is the Toshiba. It is the same one I have. Compared to the SeaGate 200GB 7.2k RPM, it runs incredibly cool. I am going to (hopefully) have Eurocom switch the drive to another one of those instead of another SeaGate. They are $5 less too!

 

LOL!

I just preheat the oven first.


Thread specific....

I wouldn't want to see temps that high, even just for testing purposes

 

they're testing perhaps so that you know that your drives would most likely still be functional after that kind of temperatures?

my drive once went up to 60-61C while doing these read write stuff.. programs nowadays can really trash our hardware

 

I worked at Compaq many years, and learned that laptops fail more often than you expect. We used to stress test our development machines at work (provided no charge by Compaq) the first week we pulled them off the build lane, to see two things:

(1) Is the laptop by design, flawed in some way (such as a bad chassis design that promotes hard drive overheating) and
(2) Is the particular laptop pulled, flawed in some way due to build quality, defective components, etc.

Torture tests caused the flawed laptops to fail inside of 3 days. If this Sager had failed my tests, I would have 30 days to return it no questions asked. Btw if you think these tests are tough on equipment, you should have seen what the test lab did to laptops - including ovens (no joke) for cooking hardware

 

>.> something seems off, one of your hdd should be running almost 10-20c cooler than the other two, its that or my WD hdd really does run cooler.

 

My IT consulting boutique integrates enterprise software and we will often run two different DBs, an ESB, two app servers and dev tools. That really thrashes the discs. The resulting response and elapsed time are often terrible.

We have a SAGER 9262 that we used for demos, but I added a custom OverdrivePC laptop built on Clevo 901. That has MTRON SSDs (SLC technology) in RAID 0 for the C drive plus a fast HD. No thermal problems from thrashing the discs and a very peppy response when doing the demo for the clients.

We also have some OPC desktops with MTRON SSDs and Areca cards for final integration runs which can cut 80% elapsed time which easily cost justifies the expense.

For regular development now we use fast HDs but as soon as there is the next price drop and MLC SSD is shown to be reliable (think Intel) I'm going SSD for all my senior integration engineers.

Phil Schaadt

 

How much heat do SSD's put out?

 

Much of the heat on the MTRONs comes from the controller chips used in SLC type SSDs. The drives are rated as nominal 2 watts but sustained maximum writes can reach peaks of 3.5 Watts. This is nominally more than the WD but the MTRONs aluminum cases have excellent uniform heat dissipation and do not get very hot across the entire case.

The MTRON Server class devices (which we use) are rated to 70 degrees C operating temps (10 C more than the WD) and MTBF in server DBs of 1 million hours. We never see high temps during our loads which are heavily read oriented.

The high temp spec for the MTRON is due to its target usage in very dense DB blade arrays with limited cooling.

These are specialty devices that are only justified if you have a business need that fits their profiles. These units are not comparable to OCZ SSDs in technology or packaging.

Phil Schaadt

 

Gotcha!
So at least the SSD's have a higher tolerance to heat compared to regular HD's.Making them more reliable and less prone to failure.

 

Normal use, like right now as I make this post, I have that differential between Drive(0) and Drive (1)

Drive (0) 48 C
Drive (1) 35 C
Drive (2) 49 C

But if you run bert's stuff test software to do the drive thrashing (long writes for a 24 hour period), you will see D(1) continue to rise till it is nearly D(0) temp.

It's the difference between using test software to torture vs typical apps i expect you are seeing.