HGST 6TB Drives Run Much Hotter Than WD RED 2TB Drives

[joeschmuck]

Well I thought I'd just post this quick blurb on my experience with my new HGST 6TB Drives (Model HDN726060ALE614) running at 7200 RPM.

Note: All the temps are while the NAS is in my computer room (~22C), in the basement it is much cooler so running temps when I relocate the box will be lower.

First of all, my WD Red 2TB drives ran at 28C to 32C 99% of the time, warming up slightly another 2C during a scrub. The fans blowing air across them were running at 7VDC to make the fans nice a quiet. All was good in the world.

So now I've been running these WD Reds for over 5 years and I thought it would be a good time to replace them with four 6TB drives, the model didn't bother me, I just needed to meet my price of $160 each. So the HGST 6TB Deskstar drives running at 7200 RPM sounded good to me. I knew that they would run a little warmer but I had no idea how much that would really be.

So I burned in the drives and used a house fan to keep everything cool (I had my six WD Reds and the four HGST drives connected) as the HGST drives were not mounted anywhere, they just laid next to the case. I eventually created a new pool and copied all the data over. About 4 days ago I reconfigured the case and removed the WD Reds and installed the HGST drives. I let these run for 3 days and then started to monitor the hard drive temps. These drives were running from 39C to 45C. I verified this over a 12 hour period and taking a temperature check every 30 minutes (using a scriopt to email it to me).

Just over an hour ago I reconfigured my cooling fans to run from 12 VDC vice 7 VDC and of course now I can hear the cooling fans run, not loud but it is noticeable in a quiet room. But the temps have dropped to 34C to 40C which is much better.

But now I need to troubleshoot the air flow issue because my drives are stacked on top of each other and here are the temps:
Top: 36C
Upper Middle: 34C
Lower Middle: 40C
Bottom: 37C

I will start by spacing out the drives.

And the quick results are: All drives now 33C to 37C. When the system is placed into the basement they will be cooler. I'm curious what they will do during a scrub. Time to find out.

So running a scrub for ~60 minutes changed the temps to 36C to 39C, not bad at all. I will be playing with the power savings modes to see if I can reduce the temperature without spinning the hard drives down, even if that means parking the heads. At this point in time the heads do not park and I have the APM set to Disable. I'm not hopeful that I will be able to bring the drive temps down any further without using high CFM fans, but I feel I can achieve a reasonable temperature regardless.

But my point about these HGST drives is that they do in fact run much hotter than the WD Red 2TB drives in the exact same environment, up to 13C/23.4F more and that is a lot. I had to reconfigure the hard drive placement and increase the cooling fan speed in order to compensate. If you are a person running 5200/5400 RPM drives and want to move up to 7200 RPM drives, this is your warning.

Also, these HGST drives do have some vibration in them and you can definitely hear the heads moving whereas the WD Reds were nice and quiet. This would only become an issue if you were to use these in a place you wanted absolute silence.

I have not looked at power draw, I know that these pull more power than my Reds but then again I did reduce the drive count by 2, should be close to a wash.

 

[BigDave]

Hey Mark,
Sorry to hear about your disappointment regarding your new hard drives.
Since your case is designed for high air flow, perhaps some serious fan research can lead to a quality fan replacement that moves more air without a noise increase. At least this is where I would look first, rather than tweaking drive settings. Keep us posted.
Dave

 

[joeschmuck]

Hey Dave,
Merry Christmas buddy.

I only have the two case fans running that are located in the front of the case where the drives are located. I've been able to get away with this setup since the entire system didn't generate much heat. Now with the new hard drives I may need to do as you suggested, find some better fans. I believe I have a pair of high airflow/low noise fans already, I just need to locate them. They could be in one of three cabinets, I just need to go hunting and hope they are the right size for the location. I'd like to get the temps down to 30C if possible when they are in the basement.

-Mark

 

[BigDave]

I only have the two case fans running that are located in the front of the case where the drives are located.

Happy Holidays to you as well!
With luck you might be able to take the voltage back to 7 and just add fans to the upper rear and top exaust positions. This would possibly get some more cfm/volume moving through the case and get those temps down to your desired 30C level. Good luck!

 

[danb35]

up to 13C/23.4F more

When you're measuring deltas, you wouldn't convert Celsius to Fahrenheit the same way--it'd be C * 1.8, but you wouldn't add the 32 as you otherwise would. A temp delta of 13C would be 23.4F. Still a significant difference (and thanks for that data point), but not quite 55F.

 

[joeschmuck]

When you're measuring deltas, you wouldn't convert Celsius to Fahrenheit the same way--it'd be C * 1.8, but you wouldn't add the 32 as you otherwise would. A temp delta of 13C would be 23.4F. Still a significant difference (and thanks for that data point), but not quite 55F.

Huh, what? 55F, where did you get that from?

 

[danb35]

Ah, playing moderator tricks, I see... (-:

 

[joeschmuck]

@Redcoat sent me a heads up that I messed up the value and changed it before you could see it. I wasn't fast enough. I did think 55F was a bit high but didn't think about it long enough.

 

[tvsjr]

That's about what mine run, in a closet that's about 22C. 4U Supermicro chassis with factory fans. Even increasing the fans to "ZOMG MY EARS ARE GOING TO MELT" levels didn't substantially reduce the drive temps (seriously, unbolt the things and put wings on the side and I think it would fly)... I think that's just what these drives like to run. I also have some of the HGST 4TB SAS drives (still 7200RPM... probably the same drive with a slightly different controller) and they run about the same temps.

Fortunately, 20K hours in, zero failures so far, knock on wood.

 

[nightshade00013]

Agree the HGST drives I have run around 32 to 38C most of the time. My place gets a little warmer at some points in the summer and I have space between the drives with pretty good airflow. Right now my miner keeps the place around 76F during the night and around 72 during the day when my bedroom door is open. Anyway a quick check puts them in the range of 32C to 36C right now.

 

[Constantin]

FWIW, in a Mini XL, similar HGST drives (7K4000's 3TB) hit 50*C with the default BIOS settings. An upgrade of the fan and revised BIOS settings later, and they stay below 40*C...

HGST's seem to produce a lot of heat... the HD list maintained by farmerpling 2 helps tell that story - the higher the power consumption, the hotter the drives will run, all things being equal.

Due to their fantastic failure rates, I will continue to use the HGSTs I have now until it is time for a major upgrade. But that list opened my eyes to the issues associated with getting heat out of cramped spaces like the Mini XL. Active power is listed at 9W per HGST Ultrastar, that's about 70W of heat that have to be removed from the case if all 8 bays are filled and active... just from the hard drives alone.

Never mind the CPU plus the optional PCIe card. Thole enchilada likely produces up to 100W of heat, all of which is supposed to exit via a single 80mm fan. Meanwhile the controller adjusts the fan speeds based on the motherboard/CPU temperatures, which will different than those of the hard drives by virtue of the motherboard enjoying two dedicated fans to wash air over it. No wonder the drives run hot during a scrub.

My coming case (Norco 431) washes all air over the hard drives, followed by the motherboard in the back. My hope is that the air flow will not only be better (two 120mm fans in the front, two 80mm in the rear) but that I might also be able to make better use of the smart fan controller in the motherboard by setting lower thresholds for higher fan speeds.

I may even modify the case to have three fans up front. There are plenty of fan interfaces on the motherboard. Just have to read up on the allowed fan loads first...

 

[Stux]

I found the same thing when I got a set of IronWolf 8TB drives. Significantly hotter than 5200rpm 4TB brethren

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...sri-f-xeon-e5-1650v4.46262/page-3#post-390929

Interesting thing is it seems to be related to if the 7200rpm drive is helium or conventional. Helium drives don’t pull as much power and thus don’t run as hot.

 

[joeschmuck]

Interesting thing is it seems to be related to if the 7200rpm drive is helium or conventional. Helium drives don’t pull as much power and thus don’t run as hot.

My luck is I'd get the drives that where Hydrogen filled instead, sure thing that they would run cooler, well until they self-destruct in an explosion.

I didn't think I'd be the only one with hot hard drives but I wasn't thinking they would be that warm in my specific computer case. I've got a few more days to play with this and I suspect I will drop the computer back in the basement tomorrow and I will see how things go from there.

 

[joeschmuck]

I have fixed the problem. It was purely an air flow issue and a few small pieces of foam pipe insulation fixed it.

What did I do, well I evaluated the air flow which meant I removed the front cover to access the fans. While I was examining the fans I noticed that I could feel a lot of air coming out the sides which actually should have been an obvious thing to see originally but I see it clearly now. So the majority of the air flow was going around the drives (path of least resistance), not through them. I immediately saw the temps lower to two drives at 29C and two drives at 30C. Major improvement. Next I dropped the fan voltage back to 7VDC and started a scrub and after running this for just over an hour my temps are 31C to 33C.

The long term fix will be to take a sheet of galvanized metal (typically used in HVAC systems) and cut it to shape and then screw it into place using four screws (or I have this double sided automotive tape, sticks like epoxy) ensuring most of the air flow is directed through the hard drives. Doing this will allow me to remove the foam tubing and give it a much cleaner look. I'll take photos of the case modification.

Photos:

The first photo is of the left side of the case, notice the gap between the front of the case where the fans mount and the side of the hard drive cage. This is about a 1" gap and allows air to flow around the drives, not through the air flow holes in the side of the drive cage.

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This is the backside of the drive cage, you can also see the gap, note the silver standoff, this is the section I'm talking about.

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And here is a front view of the case.

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Here is the item I'm inserting...

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And here is what it looks like when I have installed these two pieces of foam to direct the air flow.

Note that the holes blocked in the front are not important, it's the fact that the air flow is blocked from escaping out the gap between the rear of the fans and the hard drive cage. I could get a single large 200mm fan in and air flow would use these presently blocked holes.

 

[Jailer]

Good catch on the airflow. Air will ALWAYS flow the path of least resistance including around hard drives rather than between them.

I once achieved some excellent cooling on a motorcycle just by redirecting the airflow that was already there to where I wanted it to go. It was a similar situation of an intercooler in front of a radiator and air was flowing around the sides rather than through 2 stacked heat exchangers. Once I blocked the airflow that was spilling around the sides I had to put the thermostat back in because it was running too cool.

Amazing what a little airflow management can accomplish. Nice work!

 

[joeschmuck]

motorcycle

Zoom Zoom! My wife won't let me have a motorcycle. I used a roommates when I was younger, loved it but never purchased one. A few years ago I thought I wanted to buy one but the wife said I really didn't want one. I felt like a Stepford Husband ;)

 

[Jailer]

Heh. The warden used to refer to mine as the F-ing motorcycle. :D

Sold it about 5 years ago and I miss it. I've owned a bike my whole life and this is the longest stretch I've been without one.

 

[Constantin]

Owning a bike was fun. Sold mine after I only rode it 1 mile in two years. Too busy with work, getting married, etc. Got a cabriolet instead. Far more use!

Coming back on topic, the use of the foam insulation is a great way to ensure that the airflow is going where it is supposed to. Reminds me of the polycarbonate or PMMA motherboard covers that some supermicro rack server enclosures feature. I'll likely build something similar for the cover of the RPC-431 when the time comes to help ensure maximum air flow over the CPU / memory / etc. Maybe even attempt to vacuum form it to be shaped like the Supermicro stuff.

 

[tvsjr]

Good job on the airflow. One toy you might add to your list is a thermal imager... FLIR One, Seek, etc. It's amazing what you can learn about heat transfer and cooling with one of these.

 

[Constantin]

Agreed, would like one for Christmas... but I'd also check the local library first - many towns are now lending these tools for home energy efficiency upgrades. Use it for air flow, then review the home too! Preferably, on a ASHRAE design-day to maximize the deltaT between the inside of the house and the outdoors.

IR cameras can also help visualize water leaks in walls. Not sure that the $300 flir phone add-on can do this... May or may not be sensitive enough. The more expensive standalone cameras do.