Humidity rather than heat is the number one enemy of the hard disk

By Darren Allan

Heat isn’t the biggest enemy for the humble hard disk, rather humidity is what causes the most failures, a new piece of research has observed.

The study, carried out by Rutgers University and entitled ‘Environmental Conditions and Disk Reliability in Free-cool Data Centres’, found that the most negative effects on drive controllers and adapters were felt when humidity levels increased.

As Network World reports, the testing took place in Microsoft data centres and encompassed over a million hard drives over a period of several years, and unsurprisingly found that the vast majority of hardware failures in the data centres – 89% of them – were disk failures.

Clear difference

And as the humidity level rises, hard disk rises, failures increase to such an extent that the study authors noted you could easily tell which data centres had humidity controls, as those which didn’t showed up clearly when they looked at the annualised failure rate of controllers.

Humidity is such a danger that researchers found that positioning drives in the “hot region at the back of the server” actually improved the reliability level of the drives, because the heat kept humidity at bay – and the heat is clearly the lesser of two evils.

Whether the …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components