How cold is too cold for a hard drive?

[linkin]

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 )

 

[mihir]

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

 

[johnb35]

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

 

[linkin]

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

I'm cutting it close then

 

[johnb35]

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

 

[Twist86]

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

 

[linkin]

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:

 

[Ryeong]

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 ..

 

[linkin]

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

 

[mihir]

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