What if hard drives are placed side by side?

Question

Iron

I put 2 hdd disks so that the little finger can barely fit between them, and I screwed ssd on the side of the same panel. Looks neat. Do I need to keep some distance when placing hard drives? Does it affect performance?

Answer 1

The little finger will barely crawl through - this is at least a centimeter of space. It's a hell of a place. A typical dense arrangement of disks is a distance of a few millimeters.
What will happen to them in this case - they do not care. And it doesn't matter at all to your own temperature. A foolishly designed case can allow even a single drive to overheat. Look at the monitoring, the optimal temperature of the disk, both at idle and under load, is in the range of 35-45C.
Accordingly, with a dense layout, more powerful airflow may be required.
SSD - anyway, there are no strict requirements for installation and operating temperature.

Answer 2

Necessarily. HDDs get quite hot and should be blown by air flow, but the space between them should be at least 3-4 centimeters

Answer 3

Depends on screws.
Cold screws (green series) practically do not heat up, so it is quite normal. Especially if there is a cooler in the case that blows on them - then this distance is more than enough.
If the screws are fast, and they heat up a lot, and there is no air flow that would remove heat, then it will not be very good for them, since they will mutually heat each other and fail earlier.
In general, if it is not the distance that is important, but the temperature of the screws and the cooling system.

Answer 4

Enable disk temperature monitoring. Will heat above 45°C - spread / blow.

Answer 5

The little finger is fucking discs, you can practically lay down on top of each other, only there was an anti-vibration layer and there was enough airflow for cooling.

Answer 6

Although colleagues have already answered the question (temperature is important), I can not resist. Check out what the guys at Backblaze have posted, they're great at this stuff: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-temperat... .
In dense baskets, about 3mm between cases with airflow is considered the norm, but you have a whole finger, but without airflow :) The temperature depends on the actual load: long self-test, array synchronization, file system check - all this adds a few degrees. If the discs are stacked vertically on the spindles, the mutual heating is stronger. If sideways (spindles horizontally), then less.
If it's so interesting to find out the fate of two disks, get a SMART utility that can extract logs from the built-in thermal sensor. Modern models include an entire weather station, storing a history of temperature changes over several weeks. On Linux (and on Mac as well) the standard smartctl -x utility does this. See the full picture, lows and highs.
I experimented with 12 disks, filling the middle tower with them to the top, the distance is about 3mm, the spindles are vertical (pancakes are horizontal). Even blowing this economy, in the summer I got local SMART temperatures above 50 ° C on two or three disks under prolonged loads. I must say, it blew badly, well, the case of 2006 is not suitable for such hardcore. Even the relatively new 5900 rpm NAS drives started to fail: disappear from the system, show SMART wear attributes, and so on. I separated the two hottest ones into a separate stack and increased the airflow from the case, it got much better, somewhere closer to 40 ° C, spontaneous failures stopped, but this is still far from the recommendations of Backblaze. So the experiment continues :)