Heat doesn't kill hard drives. Here's what does

"Free-cooled" datacenters use ambient outside air instead of air conditioning. That lets us see how environment affects system components. Biggest surprise: temperature is not the disk drive killing monster we thought. Here's what is.

At last months Usenix FAST 16 conference, in the Best Paper award winner Environmental Conditions and Disk Reliability in Free-cooled Datacenters, researchers Ioannis Manousakis and Thu D. Nguyen, of Rutgers, Sriram Sankar of GoDaddy, and Gregg McKnight and Ricardo Bianchini of Microsoft, studied how the higher and more variable temperatures and humidity of free-cooling affect hardware components. They reached three key conclusions:

• Relative humidity, not higher or more variable temperatures, has a dominant impact on disk failures.
• High relative humidity causes disk failures largely due to controller/adapter malfunction.
• Despite the higher failure rates, software to mask failures and enable free-cooling is a huge money-saver.

Background

Datacenters are energy hogs. A web-scale datacenter can use more than 30 megawatts and collectively they are estimated to use 2 percent of US electricity production.

Moreover, the chillers for water cooling and the backup power required to keep them running in a blackout are costly too. As the use of cloud services has grown, the cost of hyperscale datacenters has led to more experimentation such as free-cooling and higher operating temperatures.

But to fully optimize these techniques, operators also need to understand their impact on the equipment. If lower energy costs are offset by higher hardware costs and downtime, it isn't a win.

The study

The researchers looked at 9 Microsoft datacenters around the world for periods ranging from 1.5 to 4 years, covering over 1 million drives. They gathered environmental data including temperature and relative humidity and the variation of each.

Being good scientists, they took the data and built a model to analyze the results. They quantified the trade-offs between energy, environment, reliability, and cost. Finally, they have some suggestions for datacenter design...

Heat doesn't kill hard drives. Here's what does | ZDNet

I no longer use hard drives.

I no longer use hard drives.

. . .Really see no reason for them on my systems these days. . .that is just me. . .

I feel I can only use SSDs on their own because I have a backup solution.

I feel I can only use SSDs on their own because I have a backup solution.

The datacenter of your backup service still uses them.

The datacenter of your backup service still uses them.

Um nope. I use a 4tb external & blu-rays for my backup needs.

I no longer use hard drives.

"High relative humidity causes disk failures largely due to controller/adapter malfunction."

I imagine this applies to SSD as well as HDD.

The datacenter of your backup service still uses them.

I dont have a backup service. I use a local NAS. The NAS uses WD Reds.

I no longer use hard drives.

I do. My system partitions are on SSDs, but I store all my goodies on HDDs. The lone exception is my laptop where everything is on SSD.

On one desktop I have Windows 10RTM on a SSD and Windows 10 Preview on a HDD. On the other Desktop I have Windows 10RTM on a SSD. Then I have two laptops running Windows 10 RTM. One has a SSD and the other still has a HDD. I use HDDs for data and storage.