How hot is too hot?

I placed 3 drives into my case, stacked all next to each other. All the drives are 7200rpm. The maxtor was sandwitched in between two other drives and only the WD drive (on top) and the Maxtor were active. The Maxtor and WD were on the primary IDE running at ata100off of a kt7a-raid board.

After formatting the maxtor I removed it and it was hot. Really hot. Like hotter than I ever felt a HDD get before apart from the summer time. My room is cool and the other drives never get that hot (IBM and WD).

How hot is too hot for a HDD and how do you suppose that the Maxtor got so hot in just 15 minutes? It was formatting, but man it got hotter that I think it should have. I was wondering if it was indicative of a future issue.

Many of the workstations I support are little bitty machines with built in touch screen LCDs. There's barely space to fit the HD in between the mainboard and top of the case, and they get so hot that those vinyl credit card books placed on top of the case get soft. Those drives last several years at 24/7 power on. Here's a pic of the "newer and larger" workstation, so you can get some idea of the situation.
http://www.ccrs-tx.com/new3700.JPG
Not much room for an ATX power supply, Intel i810, Celeron, SDRAM and a hard drive in that little box, eh?

Hey Ilovetheusers,

I once sandwiched 2 Seagate 6.4 gig 7200 rpm hds back in 1998 and ran them for 2 years. They got very HOT. I was surprised they lasted that long.

If possible, spread the hard drives to say the spare 5 1/4 bays in your tower and may be use a couple of bay fans or extra Hard drive heatsink kits. 7200 rpm Hard Drives range in average temperature from 50 degrees to 75 degrees C depending on usage and idling. 15,000 RPM SCSI drives can run even hotter as you are aware.

Remember the IBM's deskstar issues. They can potently fail at 75 degrees C or higher.

How hot does your Maxtor get now that it is out of that system???

It didn't get as hot in the other system, but it wasn't working at full capacity.

I took it out and it's in a baggie right now until I get my speedy system up and running. I've already got an 80gb and a 120gb in the one machine and more would just be overkill.

Anyway, my other drives run no where near as hot and I usually do have a fan in front of them blowing in between the properly spaced HDD's.

All the modern harddrives are having built-in termal sensor, what allow some special programs like "HDDtemperature" to use it for monitoring.
I use this util at home and my Seagate drive never gets hotter than 51C...Nevertheless, I'm thinking about to put HDD cooler just in case...

http://www.hddtemperature.com

thanks ruslan, another util to add to my wanted list...

Quote:

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Originally posted by Ruslan
All the modern harddrives are having built-in termal sensor, what allow some special programs like "HDDtemperature" to use it for monitoring.
I use this util at home and my Seagate drive never gets hotter than 51C...Nevertheless, I'm thinking about to but HDD cooler just in case...

http://www.hddtemperature.com

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Cool beans. So, what is a decent temp for HDD's? What is too high?

I have a case that lets me put a fan in front of the HDD's and it seems to help keep them cooler, though this proggie will tell me for sure.

MBM5 monitors my IBM HDD.MBM now has HDD temp support for most HDD's.
actually I finally have MBM working for all my needs now,I just bought a new Enermax EG465P-VE FCA PSU(which I love) and I can monitor one of the fans in it.
check it out. :)
http://users.adelphia.net/~onegighz/mbm 12 3.jpg
HDD
Current | Low | High | Average
| 27° C | 23° C | 30° C | 27° C

I have fans on all my drives in all my boxes,and in this main oc'ed box I have a thermaltake 80mm variable speed fan blowing in across the top and bottom of the HDD.

Quote:

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Originally posted by ilovetheusers
Cool beans. So, what is a decent temp for HDD's? What is too high?

I have a case that lets me put a fan in front of the HDD's and it seems to help keep them cooler, though this proggie will tell me for sure.

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I think I found some links for you to give you a better idea of ideal hd temps.

Hope these help.

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/...rmance-08.html


From seagates tech support page.

Operating With cooling designed to maintain the case temperatures, the drive meets all specifications over a 41° F to 131° F (5° C to 55° C) drive ambient temperature range with a maximum temperature gradient of 36° F (20° C) per hour.

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/...100195486a.pdf
Size: 1949231 bytes

http://www.redhill.net.au/d-maker.html

http://hardwarehell.com/harddriv.shtml

P.S. Thanks for that link Ruslan!!!!
I'll try out that program!!!

:)

Quote:

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Originally posted by cookin chef

P.S. Thanks for that link Ruslan!!!!
I'll try out that program!!!
:)

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You're welcome! ;)
By the way, I use also mentioned above motherboard monitor utility... http://mbm.livewiredev.com/ ;)