Is a COLD hard drive a bad thing?

[Jayce]

I have a student hard drive in some kind of fixture that slides into the computer towers at school, locks into place, then we boot up into our hard drives. Everyone in my class keeps their bookbags in their cars and it's cold out now. When we start class the bottom of the fixtures the hard drives are encased in are pretty darn cold. Not like they're frosted over, however they're very cool to the touch.

Is that bad to just throw the drive in and let it run? Would it be wise for it to be room temperature before running them?

 

[Juice Daddy]

here's an interesting read:
http://tinyurl.com/y99xlg

well, any computer component running cold will be able to run better,

it just depends on how cold it gets... as long as they don't let moisture into the hard drive, it should work fine

 

[Jayce]

Link is dead, but that makes sense. Thanks!

 

[Juice Daddy]

fixed it^

 

[The General]

No, freezing harddrives actually fixes them some times.

It's perfectly fine.

 

[m3trj]

It just makes the read/write head contract so it's not touching the platter, which is usually the problem if a HD has failed. Won't do anything for a working HD.

 

[Nitestick]

as said, your only concern is condensation.

 

[Ste]

So long as your students don't get them to 0 Kelvin. Lol.

 

[bmxfreakrider]

lol, i read in that, something quite intresting frankly. what if you were to get a usb enclousure and pop it in the freeze and have it connected and running? i might try that cause i got an old 3gb hdd with some priceless data on it (music, priceless vids, word docs, passwords for my sites, phone numbers, emails, etc.....) that went clickety click prrrrrrrrrrr and froze the pc, stil works, just get like 2 min even with freezer trick, then its click click click for like 1 minute then brrrrrrrrr and it makes this seek sound like its searching but like 5000 times faster than normal

 

[technogab]

Cold is not the best thing for electronics. Running cool is good, but if you gradually get it to that point. As you know, hard drives heat up quite a bit. Heat causes expansion and cold contraction. When you go from extreme cold, to heating up, you run the risk of getting hairline cracks in the circuit boards due to the rapid expansion. It's best to leave it in the room and let it gradually warm up on it's own before turning it on. Also the drive will not spin as good when it is that cold. The bearings inside will let it spin more freely when the drive is warm.

But there are plenty of people that will argue this. It's the same argument about weather it's better to leave your computer running or turn it on and off. Some people say leaving it on is better because the circuits stay at an even temperature. Others say turning it on and off is not good because of what I mentioned above, the components are constantly going from hot to cold and the expansion can cause hairline cracks in the circuits. But you will hear other people say that this is not the case, but it does make sense.