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title: Every 10°C hotter makes a hard drive about 23% more...
description: A peer-reviewed study analyzing 443,156 hard drives and 1.66 million drive-years from Backblaze's public data found that each additional degree Celsius of...
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# Every 10°C hotter makes a hard drive about 23% more likely to fail, and I make sure my NAS fans work now

**[XDA Developers](https://daily.dev/sources/xda-developers)** · 4 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A peer-reviewed study analyzing 443,156 hard drives and 1.66 million drive-years from Backblaze's public data found that each additional degree Celsius of average drive temperature raises failure rate by about 2.1%, compounding to roughly 23% over 10°C. Drawing on that research, the author checks temperatures on his Synology DS1621xs+ NAS, cleans out dust, and switches fan mode from Quiet to Cool, dropping drive temperatures from 38-40°C to 36-37°C at the same room temperature. Practical steps are given for checking drive temperatures in DSM, comparing bays for airflow issues, reviewing lifetime temperature ranges via smartctl, and setting Home Assistant alerts for overheating drives.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://www.xda-developers.com/heat-makes-hdds-more-likely-to-fail-so-fixed-nas-fans>

## Questions this post answers

### How much does hard drive failure rate increase with temperature according to the Backblaze study?

Each additional degree Celsius in average drive temperature increases failure rate by about 2.1%, compounding to roughly 23% higher failure risk over a 10°C increase. This comes from economists analyzing 443,156 drives and over 1.66 million drive-years of Backblaze's public data spanning 12 years, controlling for age, capacity, and brand. The researchers note this is a data-center association, not a lab experiment, and may not translate directly to consumer hardware.

_Track down reliability research like this on daily.dev before deciding how seriously to take NAS cooling._

### What hard drive temperature range is considered safe for a NAS running Synology DSM?

Temperatures in the 30s to low 40s Celsius are comfortable, while drives sitting in the high 40s or 50s all day are the range flagged by heat-related failure research. Checking Storage Manager -> HDD/SSD in DSM shows each drive's current reading, and comparing bays helps spot airflow problems, since a drive running 6-8°C hotter than its neighbor signals an issue rather than a bad disk.

_Developers running home NAS setups can find practical maintenance guides like this via daily.dev._

### How can I check the lifetime temperature history of a hard drive in Synology DSM?

Enable SSH on the Synology NAS and run the command sudo smartctl -l scttempsts /dev/sde, substituting the correct drive device name, to see the drive's stored lifetime temperature range. This reveals whether a past fan failure or heat wave pushed the drive close to its limit, information that a current temperature reading alone will not show.

_Self-hosters diagnosing NAS drive health can surface tools and commands like this on daily.dev._

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---

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