My Western Digital My Book 1110 runs hot - VERY Hot 113 Degrees F! Is that normal? If so, doesn’t that shorten its life considerab ly? Nothing is around, on top of or close to it. The drives in my PC run 101 and 98. Any solution?
Thanks, CMG
I believe the specs for the drive inside the case are an operating environment of:
Temperature (English)
Operating
32° F to 140° F
Non-operating
-40° F to 158° F
Temperature (Metric)
Operating
-0° C to 60° C
Non-operating
-40° C to 70° C
It’s well within its rated specs. It will run warmer without forced convective cooling. Seems perfectly normal to me
Thanks I looked and couldn’t find anything useful. I thought it was probably OK but didn’t want to give out bad information. A good test that is low tech is if you can hold your hand on it for 10 sec it’s probably OK unless you are a welder or cook so your hands are toughened by the heat.
Joe
Joe_S wrote:
didn’t want to give out bad information
Neither did I… it just seems logical that if you can “safely” use the drive when the outside air temp is 140°F, that an actual drive temp of 113°F shouldn’t be an issue. The numbers I pasted from the Caviar Green spec sheets – all my MyBooks seem to have Caviar Greens inside.
Granted it does have the PC’s fan drawing air for cooling, but one of my internal drives regularly shows 110°F if I check it in HDTune, which still seems well within the manufacturer’s specs for that drive – it hasn’t given me any issues for 5 years.
Thanks for that information. It does seem reasonable that the drive should be fine if it stays within the operating parameters listed by the manufacture. BUT, I’ve always heard (and it also makes sense) that heat kills - prematurely. So I would have thought that there would have been more of an effort on WD’s part to minimize the heat a bit better. But then the sooner they die the sooner you have to buy another I guess. So maybe that’s why they don’t. I don’t know.
But thanks for taking the time to respond. Now I’ll have to go find that program you mentioned to monitor the drive temp.
CMG-III
Yes and no.
From what I can gather, reading around verious sites, most folks seem to agree that in a ventilated PC chassis for a home desktop user, the temperature and heat make no major difference whatsoever.
In the enterprise market, cooling is a much bigger issue because the drives are creating more heat to begin with, and because the drives are expected to cope with higher performance loads.
I saw one site offering an unreferenced spec that each degree C drop in temperature relates to extending the service life of the drive by 10%.
While this may even be true, as I say, my one Hitachi internal runs quite hot and it has been problem-free ever since I bought the PC, and it has certainly outlived its warranty period.
So, on the one hand, it is true that if the MyBooks had forced cooling the drive would probably last longer… but on the other hand, you have no real idea how long that particular drive was going to last in the first place. It may outlive its usefulness to you, even without extra cooling. I have internals that are still problem-free after 20 years. Yes, they aren’t on 24/7 any longer, but they did have a good decade of 24/7 hard use before I upgraded my systems. Would it have really “mattered” if I’d extended the drives’ lives by a few more years? At this point it’s not looking like it would have been worth the cost/effort. 
I’d have to guess that between noise and the cost of a fan, WD had made a decision that forced cooling was not necessary and would probably hurt sales… and WD is presumably confident that you will get an “acceptable” service life out of the drive.
But yes, cooling the drive would likely extend that life even more.
All I know is that my MyBooks don’t really seem to run significantly hotter than some of my internals, so they shouldn’t have any trouble lasting as long as the internals do.
Roof’n guy,
Wow, you make way too much sense. I agree with your appraisal. Thanks. Maybe I’ll just get a cheap case fan and set the MyBook on top of it. Will it do any good? In my mind - YES. In fact - who knows. And does it matter? if it last 4 years 2 TB may be like my old ST225 20MB hard drive and NEVER USED any longer.
Thanks for you thoughtful reply and time. Mucho appreciated.
CMG-III
