"Hypothetical" Datacenter Overheating

Wed Jan 17 01:17:33 UTC 2024

Others have pointed to references, I found some others, it's all
pretty boring but perhaps one should embrace the general point that
some equipment may not like abrupt temperature changes.

But phones (well, modern mobile phones) don't generally have moving
parts.

So the issue is more likely with things like hard drives, the kind
with fast spinning platters with heads flying microns above those
platters, or even just fans and similar gear.

It leads me to another question which is that IN THE BEFORE DAYS you
had to wait to remove a removable disk until you were sure it was spun
down, maybe 30 seconds or so. If you lifted one and felt that
gyroscopic pull you may well have toasted it.

Today we have spinning disks in laptops you can toss across the room
or whatever so clearly they solved that problem. And they're
apparently a lot more tolerant of temperature and other environmental
changes.

So the tolerances may be much greater than one is ever likely to run
into.

I'm still not sure I'd be comfortable opening the windows to let
sub-freezing air into a 120F room with petabytes of spinning rust.

P.S. Please don't tell me what an SSD is. Yes they're probably much
more tolerant of environmental changes.

On January 16, 2024 at 09:08 saku at ytti.fi (Saku Ytti) wrote:
 > On Tue, 16 Jan 2024 at 08:51, <bzs at theworld.com> wrote:
 > 
 > > A rule of thumb is a few degrees per hour change but YMMV, depends on
 > > the equipment. Sometimes manufacturer's specs include this.
 > 
 > Is this common sense, or do you have reference to this, like paper
 > showing at what temperature change at what rate occurs what damage?
 > 
 > I regularly bring fine electronics, say iPhone, through significant
 > temperature gradients, as do most people who have to live in places
 > where inside and outside can be wildly different temperatures, with no
 > particular observable effect. iPhone does go into 'thermometer' mode,
 > when it overheats though.
 > 
 > Manufacturers, say Juniper and Cisco describe humidity, storage and
 > operating temperatures, but do not define temperature change rate.
 > Does NEBS have an opinion on this, or is this just a common case of
 > yours?
 > 
 > -- 
 >   ++ytti

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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