Brian from Backblaze here.
> What's the typical drive temperature in Backblaze's cases in their environment?
Short answer: the coolest drives are 21.92 Celcius and the hottest drive was 30.54 degrees.
I wrote this up above in response to a temperature question, copy and pasted here. The raw data dump from Backblaze includes drive temperatures as reported by "smartctl". You can find a complete set of historical data of all drive temperatures in the Backblaze datacenter here:
https://www.backblaze.com/b2/h...
We analyzed the failures correlated with temperature in this blog post in 2014:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
In a conversation with some of the Facebook Open Storage people, they said hard drives have increased failure rates at extremely high temperatures (somewhere up near 40 degrees Celcius) but our drives never get anywhere NEAR the temperatures required to correlate with failures. We monitor every drive for temperature, taking readings once every 2 minutes, and we have had situations where the drive temperatures caused our internal warning alerts to go off (well below those catastrophic levels Facebook saw failures at). When we go to investigate, the most common cause of rising pod drive temperature is that some of our fans in that pod have died. We used to have 6 gigantic fans to keep it cool, but we reduced it to 3 with no increase in drive temperature. If one of the fans dies it doesn't get warm enough to set off any alerts, but if 2 out of 3 fans die it can't move enough air to keep the pod within reasonable operating temperatures. We don't monitor the fans directly, but drive temperature has been such a good proxy for it we don't feel any pressing need to figure out how to monitor the fans.