How much does operating temperature affect the failure rates of disk drives? Not much.

The unlimited online backup service provided by Backblaze requires a lot of storage. In fact, we recently passed the 100-petabyte mark in our data center. This means we use disk drives. A lot of disk drives.

The Backblaze Storage Pod is designed to provide good airflow over the disk drives, so they don’t get too hot. Still, different locations inside a pod, and different locations within a data center will have different temperatures, and we wondered whether that was a problem for the drives.

What Other People Say

Google and Microsoft have both done studies on disk drive temperature in their data centers. Google found that temperature was not a good predictor of failure, while Microsoft and the University of Virginia found that there was a significant correlation.

Disk drive manufacturers tell Backblaze that in general, it’s a good idea to keep disks cooler so they will last longer.
All Drives: No Correlation

After looking at data on over 34,000 drives, I found that overall there is no correlation between temperature and failure rate.

Overall, there is not a correlation between operating temperature and failure rates. The one exception is the Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB drives, which fail slightly more when they run warmer.

As long as you run drives well within their allowed range of operating temperatures, keeping them cooler doesn’t matter.

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It’s been over a year since Backblaze revealed the designs of our first generation (67 terabyte) storage pod. During that time, we’ve remained focused on our mission to provide an unlimited online backup service for $5 per month. To maintain profitability, we continue to avoid overpriced commercial solutions, and we now build the Backblaze Storage Pod 2.0: a 135-terabyte, 4U server for $7,384. It’s double the storage and twice the performance—at lower cost than the original.