Hard drive overheating

Hi guys,

I did a clean install on my brand new m17x r3 last night... used the ssd in bay 0 as the primary drive and hdd in bay 1 (closer to heat sinks) as data drive (both are from my thinkpad -not brand new)... the ssd sensor doesn't work but atleast the case above remains cool.

The hdd is however overheating... The highest i noted is 57C! when playing music + CAD its sitting around 52 after stopping cad... on my thinkpad, i've NEVER seen it go past 45... even in the hottest of summers when it was being used heavily, 45 is the highest i remember seeing - even while doing CAD.

I have no idea why its acting up like this - i considered the fact the program reported it wrong but then the area above the keyboard is really hot - even more than the area over the graphics card... any ideas as to what might be causing this?

Thank you for ur time!

Carthik

 

What size/speed is the HDD?

 

What are the temps of your other components(GPU/CPU) maybe they get too hot affecting your HDDs temperatures.

 

I just did a large, sustained file transfer from my 1TB drive to my SSD and I didn't reach higher than 30° C (according to HWInfo32). There's got to be something else going on there, like maybe what katalin mentioned.

 

Its a hitachi 500gb 7200 rpm hdd...

I assumed it could be cos of the leds over the keyboard, or it being very close to the heatsinks. Mainly the heat from the gpu.

I'm on high performance mode now with the 6970 activated and its idling at 46 right now while laptop is placed over a cryo lx. I would say room temp is roughly 25-27C. The CPU cores are between 53-58, GPU is 61. I have hyper x 1600 RAM near the hdd too - could that cause any issues if its near a sensor?

Performance is not affected but the area over the drive does get very hot, which is why i'm sure it is getting warmer than it should (its ok now, but was really hot when the temp went up to 57C).

 

I doubt it's the other components raising the temp of the HD that high. It's summer now in San Diego and my R2 runs pretty hot. However, both hard drives at 7200rpm are fine, it's the CPU and video cards that are hot.

I would suspect it's the the hard drive. Check other components then consider replacing the drive or at least refit it just to make sure.

 

SMART HDD says my HDD's average read speed is 102 MB/s... that sounds really high for a HDD - i remember tests showed peak read for this at under 110 and average in the 60-80 range if i remember correctly. And this drive is now a year and half old with 400+GB of fragmented data. I would assume it would be a lot slower if anything...

Any chance its running more than its rated speed and getting this hot??

 

hd's manufactured in the last 2.5-3 years are about 100-150MB/s on the SATA interface for file transfers.

 

If it runs any higher it can get hot but then you should be noticing vibrations and whistling sounds as well. If you don't, then the drive is about to go the way of the dodo

 

no weird sounds/vibrations at all... is there any program to check rotational speed of drive?
Could it be cos of bad drivers? I haven't installed the intel rapid storage drivers cos some people had issues with that...

FYI This is the log from the SMART HDD analyzer -

Trademark - Corsair
Model - Corsair CSSD-F90GB2
Serial number - 10466514320002460026
Firmware - 2.0
Firmware upgrade - supported
Capacity - 83.8 GB
Interface - serial (SATA - 2)
Version of ATA/ATAPI - 8
48-bit addressing - supported
Logical disks - C:

Performance:
Average access time - 0.2 msec
Average read speed - 120 Mb/s
Stable read speed - 110 Mb/s
Instability of reading - 9%
Buffered read speed - 128 Mb/s
Flash memory - not supported
Flash memory power-saving - not supported
Lazy write - supported, enabled
Read ahead - supported, enabled
Automatic acoustic management - not supported
Power management - supported
Advanced power management - not supported
Command queuing (TCQ) - not supported
Command queuing (NCQ) - supported
Command queue depth - 32

Reliability:
Count of sensors - 19
Fast self-test - supported, duration in minutes - 1
Full self-test - supported, duration in minutes - 48
Current temperature - 0 °C
The highest temperature - 0 °C
Remapped sectors - 0
Connections to the power - 209
Hours worked off - 2242
Free-fall sensor - not supported
State - unreliable
Start of analysis - 5/31/2011

Access restriction:
Change of identification data - not supported
Drive access restriction - supported, disabled
Time of data deletion in minutes - 400
Hidden partition - supported
Partition access restriction - supported, disabled
Hardware encryption (BitLocker) - not supported

\\?\ide#diskcorsair_cssd-f90gb2_____________________2.0_____#5&33c64331&0&0.0.0#53f56307-b6bf-11d0-94f2-00a0c91efb8b
DEBUG - Several warm-up sensors are detected.


························

Trademark - Hitachi
Model - Hitachi HTS725050A9A364
Serial number - 091102PCE400VLG17MVC
Firmware - PC4OC70E
Firmware upgrade - supported
Capacity - 465.7 GB
Interface - serial (SATA - 2)
Version of ATA/ATAPI - 8
48-bit addressing - supported
Logical disks - D:

Performance:
Average access time - 16.7 msec
Average read speed - 102 Mb/s
Stable read speed - 109 Mb/s
Instability of reading - 7%
Buffered read speed - 210 Mb/s
RAM - 14.7 MB
Flash memory - not supported
Flash memory power-saving - not supported
Lazy write - supported, enabled
Read ahead - supported, enabled
Automatic acoustic management - supported, disabled
Vendor's recommended AAM value - 128
Power management - supported
Advanced power management - supported, enabled, current value - 128
Command queuing (TCQ) - not supported
Command queuing (NCQ) - supported
Command queue depth - 32
Tuning - possible

Reliability:
Count of sensors - 19
Fast self-test - supported, duration in minutes - 2
Full self-test - supported, duration in minutes - 131
Current temperature - 52 °C
The highest temperature - 52 °C
Remapped sectors - 0
Connections to the power - 565
Hours worked off - 6925
Free-fall sensor - not supported
State - nonfaulty
Start of analysis - 5/31/2011

Access restriction:
Change of identification data - supported
Drive access restriction - supported, disabled
Time of data deletion in minutes - 128
Hidden partition - supported
Partition access restriction - supported, disabled
Hardware encryption (BitLocker) - not supported

························

Host controller:
Intel(R) 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 6 Port SATA AHCI Controller - 1C03
Revision - 05

Drivers files:


Information about the computer:
Program version - 2.0.0.7660
Operating system - Windows Windows 7 Build 7600 x64

Critical event detected!

The critical event thing showed up after i resumed comp from sleep... no idea why!