overheating M17

Today I was going back from my home to the university and packed in my M17 (single 3870, T9400, 2 HDD's, no overclocking, stock BIOS). Apparently I did not switch it off correctly when I put it in the bag (Orion Messenger Bag). When I took it out on the train it was hot as hell, so I thought I boot it, so the fans can blow out the heat.
When Windows loaded, I got a quick look at some temperature readings. All temeratures were pretty hight, though acceptable if I were gaming. The problem were my HDD's. The system drive was at 67°C , the other one about 60° . How can something like that happen, why doesn't the PC shut of before it gets that hot?
Right after I read the temps I shut it down and removed the HDD's, to cool them quicker.
Seems like no damage is done, but I did not fully check the system jet.
Has anyone experienced something alike? I might just have been lucky that my PC did not get fried, but next time I might not be so lucky again.
I was thinking of a way to improve the HDD cooling (System drive gets upt to 60° sometimes) without a reason, but I did not have any idea.
If anyone happens to have a thought on that please reply.

 

firstly you should have shut it down before putting in a backpack. the cooling on the m17 is very suspect if you dont have any mods. secondly those temps aren't that hot really, which is why it didnt shut down.
there isnt a way to really cool the Hdds. you can take a look a the project freeze thread to get some good ideas on cooling it down.

 

Thanks for your answer, butI was pretty sure I did shut it down, otherwise I would not have put it in the backpack. And I still think 67°C is way to hot for a harddrive, its over the normal specification of any magnetic drive, but that does not matter I guess. I did read a lot in project freeze, and I am currently trying to mod the bottom cover (just need to find some time...) but as you said, there seems to be no way to cool the HDD's. Maybe I'll find a way...

 

The Orion bag is extremely well made and well insulated. It doesn't take much heat to build up inside a bag especially this one due to the clear pvc liner. It has happened to me before with Dell XPS. It never did any damage because I usually caught it an hour later. I thought I was shutting the system down but the system went into hybernation mode instead. Happened a dozen times never did any damage. If your system hung on shutdown than there is little you can do to modify HDD cooling to avoid this. If the system hung than it will continue to generate heat until it is proplerly shut down.

 

Even though laptop HDDs don't generate a huge amount of heat, it certainly builds up fairly quickly if it has nowhere to go. The laptop's chassis usually takes care of cooling, but obviously in an enclosed environment, it's not going to work very well.

I've experienced a similar situation with someone that I do work for, he mistakenly installed two full-sized drives, one directly atop another, in a desktop case that really didn't have very good air circulation. As the system was in operation, the lower drive would basically dissipate heat directly into the drive above it, causing its operating temperature to be rather high. As we all know, ICs have thermal operating limits, so the top drive's controller occasionally stopped functioning and/or mangled data when it got too hot.

Thankfully, we caught the problem before any permanent damage was done to the drives, but there most certainly would have been if we'd left it like that. He now has a 120mm case fan blowing directly over the drives, which, unfortunately isn't really possible to implement in a laptop, but certainly solved the problem for him.

 

The laptop didn't shut down because 60 degres is far from the danger zone