Humidity Degrades HDD Reliability Significantly – Rutgers University / Microsoft

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Environmental Conditions and Disk Reliability in Free-cooled Datacenters
By Ioannis Manousakis, Rutgers University; Sriram Sankar, GoDaddy; Gregg McKnight, Microsoft; Thu D. Nguyen, Rutgers University; Ricardo Bianchini, Microsoft

Based on our experience and observations, we conclude that high relative humidity degrades reliability significantly, having a much more substantial impact than temperature or temperature variation. Thus, the design of free-cooled datacenters and their servers must consider the relative humidity to which components are exposed as a first-class issue. Organizations that operate datacenters with different cooling technologies in multiple geographies can select the conditions under which their services strike the right tradeoff between energy consumption, hardware reliability, cost, and quality of service.