# How cold is too cold for a hard drive?



## linkin (Jul 16, 2010)

I'm wondering of the minimum operating temperature for most mechanical hard drives because...






It is *very* cold here.

(ignore the cpu temp, it's wrong )


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## mihir (Jul 16, 2010)

I am not sure about this but my cousin who is a Computer Engineer Told me about this.

Whenever your hard drive stops working it is usually the actuator heading touching the disks the distance between them is in microns so my cousin told me once the hard drive stops working and you want to retrieve the DATA he told me to freeze the hard drive for 24hrs and when frozen the head is freezes above the disks and does not touch the disks and you can back up the data till it unfreezes again which is like 20-30 mins.
So since freezing the hard drive is one of the solutions for data recovery I dont think that 8C is gonna be a problem.

I also found some reference info on this site
http://www.datarecoverypros.com/hard-drive-recovery-freeze.html


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## johnb35 (Jul 16, 2010)

min 5°C (41°F) Thats the safest minimal temp.


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## linkin (Jul 16, 2010)

johnb35 said:


> min 5°C (41°F) Thats the safest minimal temp.



I'm cutting it close then


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## johnb35 (Jul 16, 2010)

I'm wondering if thats the real temp.  Whats the room temperature?


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## Twist86 (Jul 17, 2010)

Well one way to heat your case up is slow your fans down or disable a few of them....less air flow = more heat


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## linkin (Jul 17, 2010)

It is the real temp. or it was. it's warmd up to about 18c now.

It's been off all night and the 8c reading was just after boot, so i assume thats what room temp is for now.

This is currently my backyard:


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## Ryeong (Jul 17, 2010)

3c to be safe.. It should work at 0c and even -20c, yet the card would not function optimal at that point or not at all ..


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## linkin (Jul 17, 2010)

Plus it would be too cold to be jsut sitting around at -20c.


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## mihir (Jul 17, 2010)

As I told you there is no limit for the hard drive temp minimum.

And if its that cold out there,if it goes bellow 0 why dont you try overclocking without HSF


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