Over the past few decades since I got my first computer, Hard Drive failures have been a problem for me till recently as my disks would last about a max of 2 years before I started seeing errors & disk failure on them. I tried all the brands including Segate, WD and a couple of others but still had the same issue. It had gotten bad enough that I was looking at buying enterprise hard disks instead of the Desktop versions even though the enterprise versions are a lot more expensive.
Then one day I was randomly looking at the temperature sensors for the system, I noticed that the hard drive temperature for 2 of the disks was at 41 Deg C. Plus the logs on the disk showed that this was a common occurrence for the disks. Then a quick Google search told me that the drives should be kept below 40 Deg to avoid disk failures. So I opened up the case and added a couple of more fans in the casing so that I had a constant flow of air over the disks. Took me about 20 mins and I already had the extra fans lying around. With the new fans the disk temperatures dropped to an between of 33-35 Deg C and I left it as is.
This was about 5 years ago. Today I was running my quarterly SMART scan of all my disks and noticed that the disks have been running for an average of 50k hours now (one of the disks is at 2k, but all others have been running constantly for a while). The max value of lifetime hours for my system is currently at: 52381 hours -> 2182.5 days -> 5.97 hours. That is a massive improvement over the previous average of <2 years. I am sure the same would be true for laptops as well but it is difficult to add another fan to a laptop so haven’t tested it. Plus my laptop doesn’t get used as often as my desktop since I mainly only use it while traveling whereas the desktop has been running pretty much 24×7 since I got it.
This shows that having your CPU/devices at the recommended temperature is essential for a longer life of the components. This is one of the reasons that all data-centers are cooled to the degree they are and any increase in the temperature maintained needs to be carefully tested before implementation.
– Suramya