Hot hard drive?

The cooling of this laptop seems pretty decent, but one thing I've noticed is that the panel on the bottom of the laptop that covers the hard drive gets noticeably warm. The windows 7 sticker on there is starting to peel a bit, since the heat has affected the adhesive. Is there no cooling for the harddrive area? I've monitored my temps with HWmonitor and nothing seems out of the ordinary I think I've gotten only one error from it. That was when my steam game (which was poorly ported anyways) froze and I could do nothing except a force shutdown. I noticed it got kinda hot. Which also caused some start up problem and prompted me to do a start up repair and eventually a system restore. I never had that problem again. I've heard of heating problems with cpu/gpu but typically never with harddrives.

Have you guys had any problems like that before?

 

what temps did you see your hard drive at? mine is constantly 35-40C
except for when fans start going crazy when i'm in game, it drops to 33c

 

The hard drive should never get very hot. They're relatively low power devices and the smaller notebook drives are even more efficient than desktop 3.5". A little bit of warmth is normal just because it's in the small bay, but that's it. It sounds like your one experience may have been a fluke though if it hasn't happened again.

 

Mine use to get as high as 45c when I was encrypting it but never saw it any higher. Idle it seems to hand in the mid 30s. So to me they do get a bit hot still but guess I was use to my desktop which had fans in front of them and ran 28c idle and mid 30s under load.

I am now on SSD so no idea on temps anymore due to no temp monitor on them (Dumb, a cheap $0.10 sensor they couldnt add when the logic is already on the board for it)

Word of advice, copy that Windows sticker info down on something. Over time the heat breaks down the ink on them and they will fade into blank stickers on you.

My job has hundreds of Dells this happened too but we use enterprise licenses so not as big of an issue and now looks like dell moved the stickers to under the batterys on our newer orders.

 

Ah I'll try to monitor it during casual browsing and compare it to some gaming when I get home.

Yea I did not know that was the windows 7 key until I got this laptop. I took a picture of it actually.

I hear SSDs are relatively cooler?

 

SSD do run cooler as there are no moving parts. Hard drives literally have spinning metal plates in there and they will generate some heat overtime. The warmth you've notice is normal for a platter hard drive. Warm is normal, hot is not.