Hot HDD or hot southbridge? M860TU

This whole hard drive heat thing is quite interesting and I decided to do a little investigation. Ad@m in his thread mentioned that his 320GB 5400rpm hard drive ran at 61C, which is awfully high for a low rpm drive. Furthermore, its temperature seemed to approach even the taunted 320GB 7200rpm Seagate, which shouldn't be happening.

If everyone takes a look at the M860TU service manual (its in another thread), you will notice that the motherboard is sandwiched between the hard drive and the right surface of the touchpad, which should prevent significant heat conduction. Therefore perhaps the heat does not come from the hard drive, but the southbridge, which is on the top side of the motherboard and therefore directly adjacent to the right surface of the touchpad.

If the southbridge produces significant heat, not only will you feel it, but it would raise the temperature of the hard drive, which is directly underneath the southbridge.

Any thoughts?

 

That sounds reasonable. It looks like there is aluminum foil/mylar on top of the southbridge so that heat should be dissipated around the area one would think.

Check out Item 49 on page 51 of the service manual or the image on page 46.

The only other item in that area is the modem. Is it normal to have a modem as a card? I thought that was generally put onboard.

 

If it's a card is it removable? I might start taking stuff out to lighten the load, a-la street racing style.

 

yes, the modem is removable. pg. 46 of service manual

 

it makes no sense for the harddrive to be the culprit, there is no reason for them to run that hot and in this model alone. i dont know what component would be the cause, but it being the harddrive doesnt make a lot of sense

 

I can't see how aluminum foil can help that much with cooling. There's simply too little material for an efficient heatsink.

I wish to get some info from M860TU owners out there. Is the heat concentrated or spread out? about how big is the area that is so uncomfortably hot?

 

Sure it makes sense. It's a tribute to the poor ventilation on the 860TU.

I guarantee if you wrapped a hard drive in a blanket it'd get a lot hotter than 61 degrees!

 

That seems right for the 860TU. My 17" same hd runs at 54 on max load, so i would assume in the thermal container of the m860tu, 15" and 1 fan when he pushes his gpu and cpu hard the heat generated heats up the hd in the smaller chassis. whereas mines is 17" and has two fans.

 

can the heat penetrate the 3mm thick silicon plastic, numerous protective sleeving, layers of stationary air and the aluminum/plastic cover alongside the touchpad and still cause an uncomfortable feeling? I have a slight suspicion that it's not the hard drive that is causing the majority of the heat. Although the HDD might run hot, the southbridge seems to be a bigger culprit.

Does the M860TU show southbridge temps?

 

Yes it can. My 7k100 does. Although there's no silicon in the way.

 

scary......

 

Heres some food for thought. Seagate server hard drives come with a 20 page manual. 3 pages of this manual are technical specs. 17 pages of this manual are for cooling/cooling techniques etc. Hard drives can be hard to cool..... Hard drives can create alot of heat....

 

I'm not sure the HD heat is as much an issue for the HD as it is for the rest of the system. I remember google did some research a while ago on the tons of drives they use and they didn't have any correlation between HD temp and HD failure.

It's just a worry though if it's heating up the entire system or is really uncomfortable.

 

Now that you mention it, I remember a couple of years ago reading something, not sure if it was from a marketing department or a research etc, that said the same thing as you. Also that it is perhaps better for the HD, to have the HD run at higher temperatures than low.

 

http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf

Sorry, if you look at figure 4 you see failures are lowest in a 35-45 C range, increasing if you go lower or higher. These again aren't likely high end drives as Google's known for being frugal and are desktop drives.

From figure 5, failures due to high temps appear to occur when you get 3 or 4 years our with the average drive temp staying higher that 40 C.

Again this is with Google's huge populations under heavy usage with consumer-grade disk drives.

I'd still be worried about the effect of the hot HD on the temp of the processor/GPU.

 

If I understand correctly it is based on SMART reports? I have a problem with that since all these years whenever I had a failed HDD, SMART never ever warned me or reported anything wrong with the drive, so, I can't say I trust that.

BTW, this is not the report I was talking about.

 

Hm...interesting, I would've thought that heat would have at least some sort of effect on hard drive lifetimes, considering it's a moving part, and made of metal which can expand or contract. Not quite sure though. Also, would the southbridge be affected negatively by temps around 60, or are they also made to withstand much higher thermal conditions?

With my cooler on my m570u, my hard drive runs at 30 degrees celsius under light load, and 37 when benched or gaming, as reported in PCWizard 2008. Hopefully this is not bad for the hard drive, as the 35-45 range is suggesting :S

 

I think notebook drives are expected to run hotter than desktop drives, so I'd assume you should be safe a bit higher.

 

So the high temps are a result of bad design? I thought the Clevos were known for how good they keep cool?

 

That's what I've heard, but this may be an isolated case.

 

I dont believe in isolated cases.

 

Well, at least not in a situation where teams of engineers should have worked for a long time on this project. This seems like an odd oversight from a company that's been focused on cooling for so long. They should've at least picked it up during testing if they didn't notice it on the drawing boards...

 

That reminds me retarded external hard drives that advertises as "aluminium case that requires no fan". Theses drives run so hot. Maybe thats the same for this laptop, its not isolated by there also no airflow or anything else. Hard drive temps are rated around 55.

 

They should`ve learned from the RUs higher temps...and they made the same mistake again.
Disappointing ...

 

You said it... I was expecting a lot more from a quality company. This is completely dissapointing...

 

it should be noted that Ad@m has reported repeatedly that he hears a "beeping" noise from the area of the harddrive.

I suspect it is not a beeping, but a chirp or rubbing noise, and the drive has a bad bearing--bad bearing means more heat.

I had a harddrive "beep" just like that prior to a failure. At the time, I didn't check the heat with any kind of gauge, but it seemed warmer.

 

wait...so the HDD is the culprit then?

I've personally always thought that hard drives are cooler areas of the computer, while control chips such as Northbridge/Southbridge are more of a problem.

 

we don't know that yet--we need to wait and see.

All I can say is that I had a harddrive that beeped/chirped and it was running hotter than a non-beeping/non-chirping drive.

I wish I would have measured it at the time to see how much warmer.

The laptop in question was a sager np5680 (still typing on it now). I can say that it was uncomfortable to rest my wrist on the palm area when the drive was chirping. I am resting my wrist there now and it is only warm.

 

I agree, isolated cases = bad quality control.

 

For real, with how long the 8660 took to be released, I couldn't imagine it being anything less than perfect.

 

I`ll wait for a few more reviews, but I have no doubt that the HDD in this laptop will run hot and fail in the next 2-3 years for sure.

 

Another M15x! I had so much hope...

EDIT: me, as many around... Just panicked by reading the huge ammount of unfounded comments posted around. I take back this irrational reaction and I now believe that, for the few reports gathered, there's only reasons to believe that the M860TU is working properly and does much better with one fan than the M15x at keeping the GPU and CPU cool.

 

its not that bad