HP dv9700t so hot

I bought an hp dv9700t about a month and a half ago with the dual 120GB ST912082 hard drives. I've noticed that the primary hard drive gets extremely hot, even when it's ventilated fairly well. Simply browsing the internet gets it close to 55 degrees after an hour.

I downloaded speedfan and ran it as an administrator, but I can't access the fans for the hard drive. Is that even possible with that program? Speedfan says the highest it's reached is 59 degrees, and honestly I don't do that many intensive tasks at all-- no gaming. I'm really thinking about contacting HP to get this fixed because 60 degrees is definitely a danger level for the hard drive, and it's already gotten so close. Anyone have any recommendations? Maybe I should swap out the 7200 RPM drives for the 5400? This just seems ridiculous

 

The hard driver temp for mine 9700t is also close to 55 even if I did nothing on it.
Guess I have to live with it for now...

 

I think that's normal. I'm not sure if the hard drive even has fans?

 

Is it just with those dual 120GB 7200 RPM drives? Would it help if I got the 320 GB 5400 RPM instead?

 

It doesn't really matter, because without ventilation, your hard drives will get hot regardless.

 

Yeah.. I guess I'm just worried the hard drive will fail.. especially if it reaches such high temperatures with light usage. It actually doesn't even sound like there are fans. I did flash the BIOS and have now updated to F.58.. but it doesn't seem to have made a difference. I've tried compressed air.. any other ideas to cool this down? Or is it just the design of the laptop?

 

That is really, really hot for a HDD. I don't have your model but had a similar issue with my dv2815nr, which had a 250g drive made by samsung. I downloaded HD Tune and found out that my drive idles between 46-48c. If I'm just browsing or using Word, it never goes higher than that. However, if I do anything that constantly reads from the HDD like downloading torrents or running a disk defrag it goes well past 50c. I couldn't even run a quick mode virus scan because it'll reach the 55c critical safe temp at only 40% complete.

Most HDD critical temps are either 55c or 60c. If you're getting anywhere near these temps simply while your PC is idle then your drive will likely fail sooner than later. If you hear beeps coming from your drive, its its way of telling you that its hit the critical safe temp. Again, not good.

If I were you, I'd call HP support. I did and they agreed my HDD was running too hot and are sending me me a replacement. They tried to get me to send it in but I've read too many horror stories from people on this site about repair service, particularly getting their notebooks back with scratches from inproper handling or waiting months. So I insisted on the replacment drive and they finally caved. Good luck.

 

Don't bother with a replacement

I've replaced both hard drives and tried several models. 7200 is way too hot and even 5400 idles about 50 often.

Design flaw I would call it. It's just a sure-fire way of making sure the HDD will die quicker than hoped..

i hope mine last long enough until I can afford SSD drives, then I think it's gonna be a lot more confortable to type. Right now my palms are burning on the heat of these guys hehe

Laptop cooling is really poor in general; why do the fan intakes have to be at the bottom and RIGHT NEXT to the air outputs. Take air from one side, put it through the internals and out the other side, duh!

I have made a special box for mine to make sure the air going in is not the same as the air coming out. It helps a lot.