The sensor is located on the case (not near the exhaust) of the server. With the structure of my appartment this is the only place I can realistically put my Server but sadly also the hottest place in my appartment.
The outside temperature is supposed to reach 36°C today so I expect the ambient temp for the server to rise another 2-3 degrees.
31.5°C also is just a bit slower at cooling, and computer devices easily reach 95°C without any troubles.
Yeah this temperature is nothing. Regularly gets over 40 degrees Celsius where I am, and all of my home servers have run 24/7 through it without issue, not in air conditioning.
Hard drives don’t really like high temperatures for extended periods of time. Google did some research on this way back when. Failure rates start going up at an average temperature of 35 °C and become significantly higher if the HDD is operated beyond 40°C for much of its life. That’s HDD temperature, not ambient.
The same applies to low temperatures. The ideal temperature range seems to be between 20 °C and 35 °C.
Mind you, we’re talking “going from a 5% AFR to a 15% AFR for drives that saw constant heavy use in a datacenter for three years”. Your regular home server with a modest I/O load is probably going to see much less in terms of HDD wear. Still, heat amplifies that wear.
I’m not too concerned myself despite the fact that my server’s HDD temps are all somewhere between 41 and 44. At 30 °C ambient there’s not much better I can do and the HDDs spend most of their time idling anyway.