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   No Correlation Between Heat and Hard Drive Failure

   Josh Centers

   The folks at online backup service [1]Backblaze have once again taken a
   statistical look at their hard drives to find out [2]if they're
   affected by temperature.

   The results seem to counter our general recommendation to give hard
   drives plenty of ventilation room in '[3]The Care and Feeding of
   External Hard Drives' (28 April 2014). Overall, Backblaze found no
   correlation between heat and failure rates, with one exception: the
   Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB drives, which failed slightly more often when
   run at higher operating temperatures. But the Hitachi drives surveyed
   actually failed a bit more frequently at cooler temperatures.

   In any case, it's still important to run drives within their specified
   operating temperatures, which means giving them sufficient ventilation.
   As long as you don't block cooling vents or put them in insanely hot
   environments, they should not be adversely affected.

References

   1. http://www.backblaze.com/
   2. http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/05/12/hard-drive-temperature-does-it-matter/
   3. http://tidbits.com/article/14708

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