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Temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit may not be damaging to disk drives, according to new research by Google engineers which casts doubt on previous findings linking heat to elevated failure rates.
After studying five years worth of monitoring statistics from Google’s massive data centers, researchers say they could find no consistent pattern linking failure rates to high temperatures or high utilization levels. Temperature, they write, is often called the most important environmental factor affecting disk drive reliability.
“This is a fairly surprising result, which could indicate that data-center or server designers have more freedom than previously thought when setting operating temperatures for equipment that contains disk drives,” write Google engineers Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz Andre Barroso. “We can conclude that at moderate temperature ranges it is likely that there are other effects which affect failure rates much more strongly than temperatures do.”
The Google researchers are more optimistic about the impact of heat on computer systems than a Forrester Research analyst who, in a Webinar for IT professionals last month, said the increasingly fine features of new chips must be protected by lowering maximum operating temperatures.
The Google research, presented this month in San Jose, Calif., at the 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, examined data center performance at temperatures from 15 to 45 degrees Celsius, or 59 to 113 degrees Fahrenheit.
They found negative effects from high temperature only for the higher end of the temperature range (104 degrees Fahrenheit or more) and even at those temperatures the negative effects were only observed for drives at least 3 years old.
By contrast, a software and hardware manufacturer known as AVTECH Software says the “optimal” temperature range to maintain data center reliability is between 68 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Google engineers do report seeing a “modest increase” in failure rates at the lowest end of the temperature distribution they studied.
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After reading the theBy Anonymous on April 30, 2007, 5:06 amAfter reading the the research link, the temperatures given make sense. However, at first glance one could confuse the Google numbers of 59-113deg to be datacenter...
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Hard Drives Only A Smal Part Of EquationBy Anonymous on March 15, 2007, 10:34 pmI agree that the hard drives are only a small part of the equation. For truly useful statistics, Google should take their tests a step further and test how higher...
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Electronics usually fail before the hard driveBy Tony Upchurch on February 27, 2007, 1:04 pmI'm curious to know more about the hardware that you used to conduct your tests. I am located in the same data center as Google and I see the servers that are rolled...
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Electronics usually fail before the hard driveBy Anonymous on February 26, 2007, 11:31 pmIn reference to your article: Cranking up the Heat May Not Harm Your Disk Drives. With 40 years of experience in electronics, I'm not surprised that the study...
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