Hard Drive Heating Up

K

Kipper

I have bought a new hard drive for my ageing PC. PC is 700mhz athlon, 256
meg ram, 15 gig old hard drive. Bought a 80 gig one because I ran out of
room on the old one. I want to keep the old one as primary and have the new
one as secondary.

First problem was the BIOS locked when I pressed auto detect. So I manually
entered the size of the 2nd hard drive as 65535 cylinders (max number I
could enter), 16 heads and 63 sectors. On the BIOS the new hard drive showed
up as about 30 meg.

When windows opened the drive showed as 80 gig, so I didn't worry.

I left the side of the PC open. The next and main problem is that the new
hard drive seems to be getting very hot. Left it on about 4 hours and it was
red hot so I have disconnected it. Do I have to buy some kind of cooler for
it. The vendor and manufacturer's websites say nothing about this. The drive
is a 80Gb Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 3.5inch IDE 7200rpm ATA133. I installed
it over the old hard drive and under the diskette. Maybe I could put it in a
5 and a quarter bay with those spacers you can get. Also I have only 1 screw
attaching the drive on each side, where there should be 2. Could this be the
reason for it heating up.

Cheers

Kipper
 
D

David Brent

maybe you you install it in the 5.25" bay with a convertor to make it fit?
or put some fans facing it.. drives do get hot though...
 
A

Arthur Legg

just put yourself on top of it for hot kippers or go to maplin for a £7 fan
which fits in drive bay above/below hard drive or hang it somewhere
vertically with lots of air around it.
 
F

Franz aRTiglio

Kipper said:
First problem was the BIOS locked when I pressed auto detect. So I
manually entered the size of the 2nd hard drive as 65535 cylinders
(max number I could enter), 16 heads and 63 sectors. On the BIOS the
new hard drive showed up as about 30 meg.
Click to expand...

Your bios needs to be updated;

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/bios/sizeGB315.html

this article shows the damn "32 gigs limit"; most motherboard
manufacturer fixed theyr bios to suppord >32Gb Hd.

Your windows xp is based on NT tecnology, wich uses a software
bios and driver for storage;(it uses the motherboard bios ONLY for boot);
that's why your bios tells "it's a 30 gigs HD" but XP can handle it correctly.

there also utility like "ezdrive" who can "trick" the bios problem by
installing a software bios onto HD's boot sector; but sometimes this trick
feeds problem with SW like antivirus or backup/repartitioning programs.

The heating problem can easyly fixed with a rack equipped with fans.

Excuse my poor english :)
 
B

Brian Day

The number of screws won't make any significant difference to heat transfer,
it needs space and another fan to cool it.

The round IDE leads are supposed to help with help disipation too.

Some mnfrs offer a 'drive guide' or similar to help with PC's that won't
recognise larger drives. Though as XP itself is seeing yours shd be ok.

bd
 
M

Max Power

Get yourself a hd fan maplins sell them they improve the hd`s life.

I didn't realise hds were alive.
 
W

Wheaty

Kipper enlightened us all with the following:
I have bought a new hard drive for my ageing PC. PC is 700mhz athlon,
256 meg ram, 15 gig old hard drive. Bought a 80 gig one because I ran
out of room on the old one. I want to keep the old one as primary and
have the new one as secondary.

First problem was the BIOS locked when I pressed auto detect. So I
manually entered the size of the 2nd hard drive as 65535 cylinders
(max number I could enter), 16 heads and 63 sectors. On the BIOS the
new hard drive showed up as about 30 meg.

When windows opened the drive showed as 80 gig, so I didn't worry.

I left the side of the PC open. The next and main problem is that the
new hard drive seems to be getting very hot. Left it on about 4 hours
and it was red hot so I have disconnected it. Do I have to buy some
kind of cooler for it. The vendor and manufacturer's websites say
nothing about this. The drive is a 80Gb Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9
3.5inch IDE 7200rpm ATA133. I installed it over the old hard drive and
under the diskette. Maybe I could put it in a 5 and a quarter bay with
those spacers you can get. Also I have only 1 screw attaching the
drive on each side, where there should be 2. Could this be the reason
for it heating up.

Cheers

Kipper
Click to expand...

You're drive should heat up a bit, that is fairly normal. How hot is it
exactly? If it is as hot as you are implying, your on your way to melt-
down, and no amount of fans in the world will save it. However, try to
space it a bit better. Install it either one space below where you have
it, or in a 5.25 bay. That will help. However I have never encountered a
drive getting as hot as you describe without having some electrical
issue. It will get hotter than your 15GB, without a doubt, faster RPM (I
am assuming your old one is a 5400), more platters and higher power
requirements. The number of screws has nothing to do with heat transfer
unless it is so sloppy that it is ready to fall out. Adding a fan will
only hide the sin here, as fans can and will fail, and it will deposit a
layer of dust over top of the casing, which in turn will cause the
internals to heat up even more because it acts as an insulator. It will
be dceivingly cool to the touch.
As for the BIOS not detecting the correct size, simply update the BIOS or
use a drive overlay.

Wheaty

"That's it! Everybody into the basket... we're goin' for a RIDE!"
 
B

Bob Smith

Kipper said:
I have bought a new hard drive for my ageing PC. PC is 700mhz athlon, 256
meg ram, 15 gig old hard drive. Bought a 80 gig one because I ran out of
room on the old one. I want to keep the old one as primary and have the new
one as secondary.

First problem was the BIOS locked when I pressed auto detect. So I manually
entered the size of the 2nd hard drive as 65535 cylinders (max number I
could enter), 16 heads and 63 sectors. On the BIOS the new hard drive showed
up as about 30 meg.

When windows opened the drive showed as 80 gig, so I didn't worry.

I left the side of the PC open. The next and main problem is that the new
hard drive seems to be getting very hot. Left it on about 4 hours and it was
red hot so I have disconnected it. Do I have to buy some kind of cooler for
it. The vendor and manufacturer's websites say nothing about this. The drive
is a 80Gb Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 3.5inch IDE 7200rpm ATA133. I installed
it over the old hard drive and under the diskette. Maybe I could put it in a
5 and a quarter bay with those spacers you can get. Also I have only 1 screw
attaching the drive on each side, where there should be 2. Could this be the
reason for it heating up.

Cheers

Kipper
Click to expand...

I just bought a maxtor 120 gig - I thought it ran hot until I touched the 8
gig I was replacing. It runs about the same temp, and I have had it for a
few years (3+) with no problem. I had an old 50meg(meg!) that ran really
hot. Had 3 mil wide pins on all the big fat chips too.

I would fiddle to get it as my primary drive if I were you. The retail
version comes with a CD with SW on it to copy your old drive (as well as
optimise for speed or quiet mode). The SW is available at maxtor.com. It
is probably slightly faster than your old drive, but lots quieter. My old
drive is 11ms access with 128kb cache, and the maxtor is 9.5ms with 2 meg of
cache, and seems loads quieter.

If you are worried about the temperature you could get a drive cooling kit
as suggested in other posts. The drive is rated at 55 or 60 deg C for the 8
or 2meg cache versions (source: dabs.com), and a rule of thumb is that 65C
is painful to the touch.

Bob
 
B

Big Mac

You're drive should heat up a bit, that is fairly normal. How hot is it
exactly? If it is as hot as you are implying, your on your way to melt-
down, and no amount of fans in the world will save it. However, try to
space it a bit better. Install it either one space below where you have
it, or in a 5.25 bay. That will help. However I have never encountered a
drive getting as hot as you describe without having some electrical
issue. It will get hotter than your 15GB, without a doubt, faster RPM (I
am assuming your old one is a 5400), more platters and higher power
requirements. The number of screws has nothing to do with heat transfer
unless it is so sloppy that it is ready to fall out. Adding a fan will
only hide the sin here, as fans can and will fail, and it will deposit a
[snip]
Click to expand...

PC Wizard 2004 reports my HD temp at 31 degrees C right now. Usually
it is 32 degrees C. It does not report an extra fan in mycompter,
only chassis & processor fans.

This sounds like it is running cool. What is 32 degrees C in
Fahrenheit? Anyone know? 32 + 32? That's too low...

But I only have the one 160 MB drive in a mini-tower.

Big Mac
 
L

Larc

On Sat, 22 May 2004 00:18:52 -0700, Big Mac

| PC Wizard 2004 reports my HD temp at 31 degrees C right now. Usually
| it is 32 degrees C. It does not report an extra fan in mycompter,
| only chassis & processor fans.
|
| This sounds like it is running cool. What is 32 degrees C in
| Fahrenheit? Anyone know? 32 + 32? That's too low...

32C X 1.8 + 32 = 89.6F

Larc



§§§ - Change planet to earth to reply by email - §§§
 
T

TTL

I'm planning to build a PC with a RAID using two SATA WD Raptor 36G
drives running at 10,000 RPM. Should I be worried about overheating?
Any one build this configuration and have HDD thermal problems?

Ciao,
TTL
 
S

snarly_online

I'm planning to build a PC with a RAID using two SATA WD Raptor 36G
drives running at 10,000 RPM.
Click to expand...

[snip]


Please do not post off-topic messages to this group.

This is the divX newsgroup.


snarly_online
 
P

phil

Anon said:
You should check the drive temperature reported by the SMART Attributes.
This can be accessed with several different programs, DiskChekup by PassMark
Software is one of them ( www.passmark.com ).

I have 3 drives in my computer, the temperature averages: 42C for the IBM
7200RPM, 41C for the Hitachi 7200RPM, and 38C for the WD (Raptor) 10000RPM.

Al

in

If you go to maplins or website, you can get a drive hard drive cooler
Click to expand...
with 3 fans cooled from front.

Works very well and only £10 I recall, may help.
 
W

Wookie

You might want to install the latest BIOS for your motherboard, it might
autodetect your HD.
 
A

Anon

You should check the drive temperature reported by the SMART Attributes.
This can be accessed with several different programs, DiskChekup by PassMark
Software is one of them ( www.passmark.com ).

I have 3 drives in my computer, the temperature averages: 42C for the IBM
7200RPM, 41C for the Hitachi 7200RPM, and 38C for the WD (Raptor) 10000RPM.

Al
 

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