Surrounding temperature

[magnusgullo]

I searched the forum for related posts but found nothing that I think answers my question.

My question is how high surrounding temperatures over sustained periods of time affects the B3? From the data sheet I can see that it's certified to run in environments between 5 and 40 degrees C. What will happen if the temperature in the room where B3 is running is close to the max for whole days, and many days in a row? Or maybe even exceeding the max for periods of a few hours.

The background is that I'm considering recommending the local football club to use a B3 in the office, and they don't really have server room... Rather the premises can get VERY hot! I have a B2 myself and know how the product and its cooling is built, but for the passive cooling to work well, I guess it's better the cooler the surrounding air is - right?

Best regards,
# Magnus Gullö

[johannes]

Magnus,

The sensitive parts of B3 is the disk. It is specified to run up to 60°C, and the disk generally gets about 20° warmer than the surrounding temperature with the current design. This is where the 40° limit comes from. Running a disk higher than it's specified temperature in general shortens it's life time. This is not an absolut science however so it is difficult to say how bad this really would be.

If the club don't need the high amount of storage I recommend using our SSD option. Then the cooling issue is gone. The regular (not SSD) disks we use produce > 70% of the total heat in B3, so changing to SSD both lowers the working temperature to close to room temperature, and raises the maximum operation temperature to that of electronics parts, in our case somewhere around 90°C.

[magnusgullo]

Wow! Impressive, and interesting! I'll seriously consider the amount of storage needed before deciding if I'm to recommend a B3 or not.

Thanks for a quick and good reply, Johannes!