Weird issue with HGST drives

I have several HGST drives that show the below:

root@truenas[~]# smartctl -a /dev/sdg
smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [x86_64-linux-6.6.32-production+truenas] (local bu ild)
Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor: HGST
Product: HUS728T8TAL5204
Revision: NE00
Compliance: SPC-4
User Capacity: 8,001,563,222,016 bytes [8.00 TB]
Logical block size: 4096 bytes
LU is fully provisioned
Rotation Rate: 7200 rpm
Form Factor: 3.5 inches
Logical Unit id: 0x5000cca099baf0f4
Serial number: VAK9U4GL
Device type: disk
Transport protocol: SAS (SPL-4)
Local Time is: Wed Oct 23 11:38:08 2024 PDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
Temperature Warning: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Health Status: OK

Grown defects during certification = 0
Total blocks reassigned during format = 0
Total new blocks reassigned = 0
Power on minutes since format = 2101
Current Drive Temperature: 67 C
Drive Trip Temperature: 65 C

Accumulated power on time, hours:minutes 1943:21
Manufactured in week 24 of year 2019
Specified cycle count over device lifetime: 50000
Accumulated start-stop cycles: 46
Specified load-unload count over device lifetime: 600000
Accumulated load-unload cycles: 127
Elements in grown defect list: 0

Vendor (Seagate Cache) information
Blocks sent to initiator = 192885571977216

The concerning part is that they all show the drive temp trip threshold as 65C and all show the current drive temp at 67C. Anyone seen this in the past and know if it Is something fixed in drive firmware or if this an issue with SMART giving incorrect indications?

It might not be incorrect data. Those are 7200rpm SAS drives rated for nearly 13W of power consumption under load.

What’s your chassis and cooling setup look like?

I have a Silverstone cs381 NAS case with 2 x120mm fans in the side and 2x120mm fans in the rear.

The fans are probably not generating enough airflow for the drives. Try contructing an airflow tunnel from cardboard, so that the fans are not sucking air in from the sides.

Looking at the layout of the CS381, it seems as if there would be basically no airflow going through your drive bay.

Right now it appears that your airflow is primarily going to be a side intake, and then exhausting through the rear almost completely missing your drives. That’s a bad situation
Unpopular opinion. I think Bane in The Dark Knight Rises is great. : r/batman
and the long-term health of your drives.

I’d recommend trying by removing the side fans, blocking off the side intakes - and any other intake other than the front - and (dramatically) increasing the speed of your exhaust fans, in an attempt to cause it to pull air through the drive bays for some manner of active cooling.

Failing that, you may need to explore a different case.

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I have the rears setup to exhaust and the side setup to blow in. Interestingly, I have 4 other HGST 7200 RPM/8TB drives in the same chassis, but those drives say their drive trip is 85c and are running at 59c.

Yeah…like this there is no airflow over the drives. The air needs to be pushed or pulled through the tiny space between the drives.
Slow turning 12cm fans are not good at that, especially if they are mounted like they are in your case.

See also the reply of @HoneyBadger .

He actually does care :grinning:

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I’m betting your 4 drives with a cooler temperature are the ones closer to the side fans.

The problem is that you’ve got a “short-circuit” in your cooling airflow.

Cool air comes in the side panel through the 2x side fans, and then takes almost a direct route out the back, just grazing the four bays closest to the edge. You’ve also got the hot-swap backplanes in each cage blocking the airflow through them front-to-back.

In general, this case quite honestly doesn’t seem well-designed to support eight drives with proper cooling. :thinking:

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If you had a warranty, it is void now that you have exceeded the Trip Temp, but if you have a failure, I’d at least give it a try.

You have 5 of these drives in the system, do you have any other 3.5" HDDs? I ask because if you are able to space the drives apart so they are not all sandwiched in a stack, you could promote better airflow and pull that heat away. If you have the rack full of drives, this will not be possible. Then I would read the rest of this posting.

Based on what I found out about this case, I would make all four case fans as exhaust fans. This would pull the most air across the drives in the cage. The only thing of concern for me would be if the fans are struggling to pull air into the case.

As I see it, the power supply pulls air in from the bottom of the case and can exhaust it out the rear of the case so the power supply remaining cool is not an issue.

If you do these steps and the drives are not cooling as they should, I would place some tape over the rear panel air opening (the grid of square holes) to improve airflow across the drives.

If the drives are still not cooling enough, you may need to use a different case.

Reminds me of the drive cooker DS-381…

Long term, that’s still not a good temperature for hard drives.

I swapped out the two rear fans for fans that have more flow. I went from 50 CFM for each fan to 75 CFM for each rear fan, and so far temps for the drives are 20C lower than they were before. I’m going to test over the next couple of days to make sure.

Well that only lasted a few hours. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to buy a new case. Anyone have any recommendations? The CS382 looks promising, but I’m not sure I want to take another swing with Silverstone.

What are your requirements?

8 SAS drive bays. Room for an mATX board with at least two slots (10g NIC, and LSI controller), so I don’t have to replace too much.

Did you make all the rear and side fans blow out of the case? If not, recommend you try that first.

I changed the side fans to blow out, and it made no appreciable difference. Opening the front seems to be at least keeping temperature from climbing for the time being. I’m going to continue to watch it for a few hours to see.

Update: Opening the front just delayed the inevitable. I noticed another issue with this case is that the CPU is right below the drive cages, so that is also adding heat to the drives. Now, I’m wondering if a radiator setup would help with this, as it would keep the heat from the CPU from going straight into the drives?

I’ve been involved in a few case airflow issues over the past week so I apologize if I’m repeating something.

The drive cages, do they have rear fans and if so, are the fans sucking air in from the front of the case, across the hard drives, and into the case?

If they are doing that, and all four of the case fans (2 rear, 2 side) are exhaust fans as well (blowing air out of the case), then I’m out of simple ideas on how to keep those drives cool other than a better drive case that allows air flow.

If you had to remove the drive bays, could you hard-mount all the drives in the chassis and have room for airflow across those drives now? I know people want removable drive bays but those are not really needed for every project. I will admit they are neat to have but for a home or small office, how often does a hard drive need to be replaced and is it that terrible to remove a few screws to get the job done?

Hopefully you are able to find a solution you are good with.

Unfortunately, the drive cages have no fans and no room to mount them. The only spots for fans in the case are 2 side fans and 2 rear fans, each fan is 120mm. The SAS connectors are directly behind the cages. There are 3 pin fan connectors on the back of the cages, but no where to mount fans. The only option I can see is trying to mount small fans (80 or 92) to the side of one of the cages, but I suspect that won’t do much.

The product guide does a pretty good job of illustrating the dilemma.

I was going to suggest to brute force it with industrial fans, make it LOUD!

But then I started to look for the air intake and the only thing I see is something at the bottom of the front panel, which would lead the air underneath, instead of through, the drive cages…

What where they thinking…

Maybe consider modding it like this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/gskxzp/comment/fs6nh4e/

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100%.

The trick with cooling HDs is to ensure that a cooling fan draws air passed the drives. This means ensuring it can’t bypass the drives. So duct work and sealing holes.

The Noctua 3000rpm fans are fairly good as they provide a lot of cooling power but can dial back to near silence when less cooling is required.

I don’t think you mention what motherboard you’re using, but if it’s Supermicro young. Use a dual fan zone fan controller script to cool the cpu zone and hd zone separately to minimize noise.

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