dv6000 Hard Drive Temperatures

Hi all,

I have a HP dv6375us laptop that's about 3.5 years old. Last week, I decided to get the ST9750420AS (Seagate Momentus 750 GB 7200 rpm drive) for it. I upgraded from a WD 160 GB 5400 rpm drive. As soon as I put the drive in, I realized that it runs quite hot. I knew that a 7200 rpm would naturally run a little hotter than the 5400 rpm drive I had before, but my old drive would range between higher 30's/lower 40s when idling and get up to mid/high 40s or maybe 50C max, under load. This drive idles in the mid 40s, sometimes low 50s, and under load has hit 61C. These temperatures seem unusually hot, especially since the operating temperature limit for this drive is 55C (I think).

I realize that this laptop probably doesn't have the best airflow for the hard drive (the HD bay is pretty tight without a lot of breathing room) but my old drive ran a lot cooler. In the SMART status, there's a warning that the airflow temperature is below the average limits. In HD Tune, under airflow temperature, it says “Error! Threshold Reached! Replacing the drive is recommended.”

My question for those of you with dv6000s is how hot do your HDs run? (Preferably if you have a 7200 rpm drive like me.) I'm wondering if this amount of heat is normal or unusual. Right now, just with Firefox, Outlook, and Word running, and the HD sitting completely idle, not being accessed at all, the HD temp is 53C.

I've had some other problems with this HD as well. Yesterday, while backing up files to my external, the computer blue-screened (first time I've ever seen that with Windows 7!) with an NTFS error. When I restarted, the SMART status reported that there were 8 pending sectors that couldn't be written. After running ScanDisk, that has now gone away, but the computer crashed again while running an HD Tune scan (I was away from it so I'm not sure what the error was that time, but I came back and it had restarted), and HDD Regenerator reports no errors, but a delay in the first 1500 or so mb of the drive. The SMART status in Speedfan passes, but the raw error read rate, seek error rate, hardware ECC recovered, and Ultra DMA CRC Error Rate are only in the middle of the graph, at "normal" rather than "very good."

So, I'm going to send it back to get a replacement, but I'm wondering if the replacement will have the same temperature problems as well or if the temperature problems are due to this drive being defective. I can always choose to replace it for the Samsung HM640JJ (the 640 GB, 7200 rpm drive) if these drives run hot, but I haven't noticed it being mentioned at all as a problem by other owners of this Seagate drive, which leads me to believe that it is a problem with this specific drive.

 

I would exchange that HDD. I have a HDX-18 with two 500GB Seagates Momentus 7200 rpm HDDs, they do not feel hot where they are installed. I don't have any software to tell me their temps. Mine also have no real airflow either.
I also have a DV9774 with two 7200 rpm Seagate HDDs. I can't remember which models I bought, it was a while ago, no doubt smaller versions of the ones in my HDX. They also don't give off noticable heat.
I have never had any trouble with these drives. I think you just had some bad luck.

 

Thanks Nilst. Yeah, I think I'll return it for the same model. I read a review where my HD was installed in a dv2500 (basically the same laptop as mine, but in a 14" form factor) and in all the test screenshots in HD Tune, where they were doing lots of read/writes, the drive never got above 45C. Mine has been stuck at 53C, and it has been completely idle.

This is my first Seagate laptop HD, but I have had good luck with Seagate's desktop drives in the past (I have one that's 3 years old and one that's 6 years old and both work perfectly) and 3 of my friends have Momentus drives in their laptops (albeit MacBook Pros) and all run very cool and have been reliable. So, I'm thinking that I just got unlucky. I'm going to return this one and get a replacement, as I would like to stick with the 750 GB size.