How to make my Hard Drive Cooler? I have a theory please help [Pictures]

Should I add thermal grease to my HDD or some sort of heat shield?

I recently bought a Thinkpad T61 and the right palm rest gets way to warm for me; it's really annoying.

I want to fix this and have done all I could think of software wise and it didn't make much difference.

The hard drive in the machine is a 100gig Segate Momentus 7200rpm (That would probably explain the heat). The hard drive seats right below my palm rest.

I was thinking... will adding some sort of thermal grease/paste (AS5?) to this part on my laptop(view below) help?



This is what seats on top, so I would also have to cover this some how.



Any insight would be great.

Thanks!

 

AS5 ain't gonna do any good. The harddrive is shock mounted so it's not touching any metal part of the laptop.

A heat shield will block the heat from you but it ain't gonna do your harddrive any good as it'll just trap more heat.

 

I would sell your seagate 100gb 7200rpm drive as it consumes the most power out of any of the 7200rpm hard drives on the market. I would pick up a Hitachi 7K200 harddrive, as they only consume 800Mah instead of the 1200 mah which your seagate consumes.

I agree that arctic silver will do nothing in your case.

I have a T61, and I have no heat issues, mainly because the hard drive is a 5400rpm hitachi.

K-TRON

 

That aint going to do jack.

Also too funny how you want to use AS5. AS5 is capacitive conducting and can screw up circuit boards if it gets between traces on a board. Too funny! Have fun!

 

Thanks for the replies.

I know the AS5 theory is funny , but it was a nice hope. I guess I will have to swap drives.

I currently have a 7k200 200gig in my Ultrabay adapter. Do you guys think this will fare better? I wanted to keep the bigger drive in the Ultrabay, but I can't deal with this heat issue in my palm rest any longer.

 

You can always swap the drives and test it. The 7K200 should run much cooler as it consumes less power than your Seagate. Its worth a shot, when I upgraded from the 7K100 series to the 7K200 series, my hdd temps of my raid array dropped like 35F. Then I upgraded the harddrive fan to further push my hdd temps from 168f down to 120-124F.

K-TRON

 

wow, someone recommending hitachi, just a warning, I have had 3 hitachi hard disks 2 of them have failed. completely... the other works ok...

 

You can always cut the plastic palm rest and replace it with mesh if you want it to cool down that badly. Honestly your options are basically replace he drive of try one of those notebook cooling pads.

 

Ok, I guess I'm onto swaping drives. I'm currently searching how to clone my current drive onto my 7k200. It's worth a shot.

I'll let you know if this is any better after the swap is complete.

If some one has any other inputs comments are still welcome!

 

get the cooling pad. less hassel.

 

buy a laptop cooling fan and mount into laptop to pull air across HDD and out laptop. will require modding.

 

I recommend the Hitachi 7K200 also.

 

Ok here is the update.

First of all big props for Acronis True Image 11. I was able to clone my Seagate HD into my Hitachi without any trouble at all; not even a sweat. A tip for others though, go with the manual settings and make your recovery partition the same size as before; other wise the recovery partition will also be expanded (mine wanted 13gigs; I made it 6.6gigs which is all that's needed). I actually went to bed and when I woke up this morning the process was done so I swapped the two drives and all was fine.

Now on to the heat issue.

The Hitachi drive is runs cooler, although it can still get a bit warm. I think I can live with this though. In fact, the Hitachi was fine for normal usage but then I pushed it to the limits running a virus scan, doing searches and moving a big file at the same time. It got hot then, but I still could leave my hands in the palm rest. This was not possible before with the Seagate Momentus. Actually the Seagate got hot right from the get go with normal usage.

The speeds seem to be the same; I didn't notice any slowdown or increase in performance. The boot time is one second better with the Hitachi, but that's not really anything; I think it might've been my speed with the power button and the timer was not the same. The windows experience index changed though. Before I had a 5 for the Disk data transfer rate and now it has increased a wapping .4 points! The current rate is 5.4. Could this be due to the bigger capacity? I don't know.

The Hitachi runs quieter I think. I'm not an expert but in my office I could hear the Seagate run and scream some times. The Hitachi seems to be running quieter.

The Hitachi has more vibrations though. I keep getting a massage from it while my hand seats on the palm rest. This is not all the time though and it’s nothing to worry about.

I’ll give this a try for a while and we’ll see If I can live with it. I don’t want to downgrade to 5400rpm. I also don’t want to add any cooling pads to my laptop as I want to be as mobile as possible all the time. I might buy some sort of pad to put on top of the palm rest in that area though. I would only use the pad in certain situations when the hard drive works harder and the palm rest gets warmer. Other than that I think I might be ok.

Another plus is that the Hitachi actually cooled down after the virus scan and intense work. The Seagate never cooled; probably because it was hot right from boot up.

Hopefully they make those SSD drives bigger and cheaper soon. I'll jump on a 100giger for $300 to solve all of my problems. That might be years away though.

Thanks for all the replies!

 

Thanks for the great and informative update!

 

Thanks for the update and comparison.

FYI Tom's Hardware have recently published a detailed review of the 7k200 and the 5k250. It definitely looks like Hitachi have done a commendable job of dropping the power consumption.

I've had some notebooks where the HDDs keep cool and others where they get hot. The cooler ones usually, but not always, have some air vents in the HDD compartment so that some of the air blown out by the CPU fan gets sucked in past the HDD.

John

 

IF the heat bothers you, adding thermal paste won't do nothing at all.. If you want all the heat going back down to the harddrive, put a piece of tin foil, shiny side face the drive, and tada.. It should reflect all the heat away from the palm rest where you're hand it.

 

Il have my roasted hard drive with carrots and chips please.