Hot Drives?

nevets2001uk · 20 Jan 2008 at 19:28

I've just had a year old Seagate Barracude 320GB drive fail on me. At least I think it has. It was working without any problems and suddenly the system crashed and restarted. During post the drive was no longer detected. I attached another drive to the same SATA cable and that was fine so I assume the drive needs to go back.

When the system starts I cannot even feel it spin up and the circuitry underneath gets very hot very quickly. Am I right in assuming the drive is dead and should be sent back? It's still under warranty.

Second question. I got a little worried about the other drives in the system as they are pretty hot to the touch as well. I have an IBM IDE 100GB and Maxtor 300GB SATA both which feel hot to the touch.

I loaded up speedfan and it says that the IDE drive is 60 degree C and the Maxtor is 54/54 degrees. These sound pretty high but too be honest I'm not sure what the norm would be.

CPU is around 46 degrees for reference.

Advice welcomed and appreciated.

PhillyDee · 20 Jan 2008 at 19:33

Thats roughly the maximum temp for a ahrd drive. You want some cooling in there. What case do you have?

smsmasters · 20 Jan 2008 at 19:40

That's hot for a HD. I would check your case cooling.

nevets2001uk · 20 Jan 2008 at 19:59

It's a fairly cheap and basic case. I've got an 90mm fan mounted on the side blowing air onto the CPU and that's it.

Any good case recommendations for a reasonable budget but with good cooling?

nevets2001uk · 21 Jan 2008 at 09:57

An additional question...

Will operating at these temps have caused any potential long term damage? If so I will consider purchasing new drives to replace these after buying a new case.

MumboJumbo · 21 Jan 2008 at 17:05

could have caused corruptions perhaps.

As for cases.

Well depensd what your budget is but here are two good cheaper cases:

Lian li do some of the best looking cases and well designed air flow. I love them as their aluminum brushed cases by far beats plastic ones but you do need to buy the aluminum bezels to go with the optical drives so they match the aluminum.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-054-LL&groupid=701&catid=7&subcat=187

next on the list is a case which i dont know to much about but i beleive to be a good case:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-017-TT&groupid=701&catid=7&subcat=

schumi84 · 21 Jan 2008 at 17:17

The soprano is a very nice case, built a system recently for a mate with the silver variant of that.

Space at the back for a 120mm fan and also one at the front, allowing very good airflow, and iirc the fan at the front is positioned so as to allow it to push air over the hard drives, will need to double check that though.

nevets2001uk · 23 Jan 2008 at 08:50

Thanks for the suggestions. As a short term fix I purchased a 120mm fan which just about mounted in the front of the case and is blowing air at the drives. I've used a cheap 80mm fan as an exhaust at the back.

Last night's temperatures were around 37 degrees, although I did get a peak of 43. Should this be okay until I can get the money toegther for a new case?

ByteJuggler · 23 Jan 2008 at 10:33

nevets2001uk said:
Last night's temperatures were around 37 degrees, although I did get a peak of 43. Should this be okay until I can get the money toegther for a new case?

Yes that will be fine.