M4400 hard-drive (ST9320423ASG) temp under light use

Greetings all,
I have a two month old M4400 with a ST9320423ASG hard-drive that hovers at around 40-41 deg.C (as reported by HDTune) under very light use (basically just Thunderbird and Firefox ). I'm running Win7Ultimate 64-bit and the power plan is most of the time either on "balanced" or "dell".
This is what hdparm says about this drive (excerpt):

Code:

Advanced power management level: unknown setting (0x8080)
Recommended acoustic management value: 208, current value: 208

I wanted to know whether this temp is considered normal under my described usage conditions and if there's any tweaking that can be done to lower it.
Another bit of interesting information about this drive is that it used to click like crazy when it first came from Dell, until I installed the firmware update in mid Dec. It's been quiet like a mouse since then but I'm wondering if the new firmware could have made it run hotter.
Thanks!

 

Under light usage the HDD temperature will be strongly influenced by the ambient temperature inside your computer. 41C looks reasonable for the M4400. The inside of my E6400 tends to be a little cooler, but the P8600 and Intel GPU are not big producers of heat.

The temperature to watch is under heavy disk usage. 2.5" HDDs usually have a maximum rated operating temperature of 55C.

John

 

Thanks John for the info! It's not terribly worm to the palms but it's noticeable and I was expecting it to be cooler under light use. Thanks!