Clear Critical HDD temp alert?

[mgkelly]

How hot is too hot?
My drives just hit 46 Celsius - feels too hot to me but short of switching off Ive just stuck a household fan pointing at the drives withe the door open

 

[Chris Moore]

How hot is too hot?

In the long run, drives tend to last longer if they are cooler, I try to keep mine below 35°C, but they will usually work up to their rated limit, which is different depending on the drive model and manufacturer, but most drives are rated up to 50°C and I have some drives at work that are rated to 60°C.
After they go above that temperature, they do tend to malfunction and the life is significantly shorter.

My drives just hit 46 Celsius - feels too hot to me but short of switching off I've just stuck a household fan pointing at the drives withe the door open

Can you give more details on your hardware setup? We might be able to offer some suggestions on a long-term cooling solution.

 

[Chris Moore]

How do I clear the Alerts?

I know that your situation, having been in 2015, is cleared up by now, but I wanted to add some data to this thread for anyone that comes looking in future days.

There is a file in the /tmp folder named .smartalert and it is important for me to mention that the dot is effectively part of the file name. For the Windows folks, that is the Linux / Unix way to make a file hidden. That file contains the current error that the OP wanted to clear.
When I have some over temp alerts that I want to clear without rebooting the system, I use SSH to connect to my system and then CD /tmp to get into the directory where the file is. Once there, I use nano .smartalert to edit the existing file.
You can use any editor that you like, I use nano because it is already installed and I am familiar enough with it.
With the file open in nano, I use <CTRL> K (the control key and letter K pressed together) to delete the lines in this file. I then use <CTRL> X to exit and I save the changes.
It takes a few minutes for the GUI to update and then the error is cleared. I had a system that was up for over 150 days with no reboot and during that time there were several temperature events that I cleared with this method. It works perfectly on FreeNAS 11.1, but I have not tested it in later versions of FreeeNAS.
Please do not use this as a way to ignore a problem that needs to be resolved.

 

[mgkelly]

In the long run, drives tend to last longer if they are cooler, I try to keep mine below 35°C, but they will usually work up to their rated limit, which is different depending on the drive model and manufacturer, but most drives are rated up to 50°C and I have some drives at work that are rated to 60°C.
After they go above that temperature, they do tend to malfunction and the life is significantly shorter.

Can you give more details on your hardware setup? We might be able to offer some suggestions on a long-term cooling solution.

Thanks for the reply:

I have freenas setup n a HP Proliant Microserver Gen8 - 2 pairs of 4tb drives set up as 2 separate 4tb pools - 2* WD Greens - these are 540 rpm drives and currently 43 degrees (I switched the parking with WDIDLE) ; the other 2 drives are WD Red pro 7200 rpm (I didnt nee the pro they were just on special offer) - these are running at 46 degrees.
The freenas system itself is very light use - basically just a media server and photo store/ backup. The drives are mapped as drives into my Windows Server VM that sits on a Dell machine.

The server in in my attic - and it is pretty hot in the UK these last few days. So I was considering if it was best just to power the machines off for a few days?


BTW thanks for the info above on clearing the erro - I hadnt realized it was from 2015 lol

Thanks for the advice

 

[Chris Moore]

WD Red pro 7200 rpm (I didnt nee the pro they were just on special offer) - these are running at 46 degrees.

Those Red Pro drives run very hot compared to other drives I have used and all the Western Digital drives run hot by my standards.

The server in in my attic - and it is pretty hot in the UK these last few days. So I was considering if it was best just to power the machines off for a few days

No server, or computer for that matter, should be kept in an environment that you are not comfortable in. If it is hot for you, it is too hot for the server. The Red Pro drives expect an ambient temperature that will keep the drive at or below 60°C and lower is better as long as it isn't below 5°C.
I would not expect an attic to be advisable. I know that my attic reaches 60°C by noon and a drive can't be kept cooler than ambient no matter how many fans you have blowing on it.

https://www.wd.com/content/dam/wdc/website/downloadable_assets/eng/spec_data_sheet/2879-800022.pdf

 

[mgkelly]

Those Red Pro drives run very hot compared to other drives I have used and all the Western Digital drives run hot by my standards.


https://www.wd.com/content/dam/wdc/website/downloadable_assets/eng/spec_data_sheet/2879-800022.pdf

Thanks for that...I managed to find the Green data sheet too. I feel a bit better about the running temp now I see both are rated to 60.
In the UK the temp will very rarely get to what it is right now - we are having a freak hot spell....prob 10 days per year and althought it is hot.up there I would think less than 40 degrees. I will measure to see and take your advice of it is getting too hot up there.