Using one of those cute monitor programs I noticed my hard drive is
going up to 50C, idles around 44C.
Is this hot as hell like I think it is?
Is there a way to stop, limit, prevent my hard drive from getting so
GD Hot?
Also, why are drive made this way?
My TV and MONITOR don't overheat and neither has a fan in it so their
must be some reason the HD people want our hard drives to get hot as
hell?
I'm wondering about heat spreader type things and such.
p.s. I wish it was legal to payback companies that make these products
dependent on other sources of cooling. I'd start with some Goodfellas
methods if possible. Maybe some Casino "cornfield scene" next.
Please help, try to ignore my anger.
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Note that your TV (and probably CRT monitor) do produce a significant
amount more heat than your hard drive possibly can produce, but notice
that on the back of your TV there is substantial amount of ventilation
slots and the TV is a lot bigger than a hard drive surface area so the
heat per CM sq is a lot less. If you opened a CRT TV you would find
substantial heatsinking (that runs quite hot) on the power supply
transistor, horizontal output Transistor and the vertical output
amplifier stage too. The neck of the picture tube runs so hot you
would burn your finger on it if you touched the glass for any length
of time. (DONT try any of this at home !!)
Out of interest though, many recent Pentium processors dissipate
nearly the same amount of watt energy in heat, as an entire 20" TV
would draw from the mains
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back to the hard drive,
3 things to think about,
Make sure your power supply is of sufficient wattage. I have had a
situation where 2 hard drives were being run in the same machine, one
got very hot other was normal. Spoke to dealer, he said to upgrade
power supply to a larger wattage. (in this case, upgraded to a 450 W
RMS) It worked and the hot drive ran cooler. (I can only assume that
the supply was getting overloaded and the voltage was dropping and was
somehow resulting in overheating of the drive)
(If your power supply has really thin leads, and you are using the
furtherest plug from the power supply to power the hard drive - this
can also cause a voltage drop, possibly resulting in the same
symptoms ?)
Mount a heatsink on your hard drive, if there is space. In a
commercial application in a hot environment I have used a finned
heatsink of a similar base size to the base of the hard drive and with
7 x 1" fins on it. (it was taken from a junked 60w audio amp) screw
it firmly to the drive, making sure it doesn't short circuit on
anything in the process, and use heatsink compound on touching
surfaces.
If you don't need fast drive speed, or 100's of GB of space, and don't
mind the higher price consider a laptop drive. (you will need an
adaptor if you want to run it on a home PC IDE, or you can buy one of
the newer SATA types) These generate hardly any heat, even when they
are enclosed without good ventilation and running constantly, and I
have found that they are much more reliable and tolerant to vibration
etc. They will happily run for most of the day in commercial use and
still last some years before failing !
