My HDD is at 56C, should I be concerned?

One · 24 Jul 2012 at 20:34

I recently got an SSD for my laptop. My laptop has two drive bays. One of them the topside(keyboard side) has always been warm to touch, I imagine the CPU is probably close by. The second one is cool as a cucumber (30C so quite a hot cucumber in reality).

Now as my HDD is now being relegated as a media drive pictures, music, tv, film, etc I decided it won't be being used as much as the SSD which is my OS and programs. So I put my HDD in the second bay and my new SSD in the primary bay.

Temps of my SSD are 30C, however after doing a large transfer (30 minutes) from my external to the HDD the temp has spiked to 56C.

It is rather hot today however am I right in having the two drives this way or should I swap them so the SSD which creates very little heat in the hot bay and the self-warming HDD in the primary cool cucumber bay?

Or is 56C not actually that bad better to keep the SSD cool etc. I hope this situation has come across at least semi-reasonably so someone will be able to help.

Ta.

AbsenceJam · 24 Jul 2012 at 22:03

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/verbose

56 is fine, but your SSD produces no real heat nor do they need cooling.

bemaniac · 24 Jul 2012 at 22:26

hmm I have one SSD jammed under my HDD in the final slot.......been fine so far lol

One · 24 Jul 2012 at 22:28

AbsenceJam said:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/verbose

56 is fine, but your SSD produces no real heat nor do they need cooling.

lol thanks for the definition

You say SSDs don't need cooling, however it was advertised as having a 0C-60C operating temperature.

Are you suggesting that swapping the bays would be better? Bearing in mind that at rest my HDD is 50C in the hot bay. Rough estimates suggest that the hot bay would make the drive 10C hotter, so with the SSD in the hot bay and the HDD in the cool bay, both drives would be at 40C.

This does seem preferable IFF 40C is no worse for the SSD than 30C AND 40C is better than 50C for the HDD.

p.s. What source or how do you know 56 is not bad for the HDD?

Kotu · 24 Jul 2012 at 23:20

ive had drives running at 80C without them failing, old cases were pretty bad for keeping drives cool.

If the drive doesn't get used much, you could set it to power down after a shorter period of time, it would produce a lot less heat when its not running, but it does mean you will have to wait ~10s when you do access it while it spins up again.

One · 24 Jul 2012 at 23:26

Kotu said:
ive had drives running at 80C without them failing, old cases were pretty bad for keeping drives cool.

If the drive doesn't get used much, you could set it to power down after a shorter period of time, it would produce a lot less heat when its not running, but it does mean you will have to wait ~10s when you do access it while it spins up again.

How do I set this up for individual drives? I know the setting exists in power settings but I don't want/need my SSD to also power down after a certain amount of inactivity.

kona786 · 24 Jul 2012 at 23:57

desires said:
How do I set this up for individual drives? I know the setting exists in power settings but I don't want/need my SSD to also power down after a certain amount of inactivity.

Pro-tip - use speedfan to monitor hdd temps - untick the hdd's you want to let sleep.

speedfan keep hdd/ssd's awake all the time when monitoring temps.

One · 25 Jul 2012 at 10:11

Here is a quote from another forum

If the SSD is your main drive, it will stay active. The other drives will go in a low powered state when you change it from never.

Can anyone confirm if this is true? If so, if I were to lock my system would it still be true that a system disk won't idle? I'm finding it hard to believe seeing as most regular users don't have more than one disk and yet MS offers the option to users.

I have speedfan with the only temp monitor as my SSD and it seems to be working.

Kotu · 25 Jul 2012 at 12:32

I don't think SSDs have much of a low power state, they already draw very little power and they have no motor to wait on when turning on/off. Even if they do power off, I would think accessing them would still be almost instant.

One · 25 Jul 2012 at 13:05

Kotu said:
I don't think SSDs have much of a low power state, they already draw very little power and they have no motor to wait on when turning on/off. Even if they do power off, I would think accessing them would still be almost instant.

It's more about the garbage collection they do when idle, in preparation for writes which is why they should be left on all the time.

Anyway, I've put drive idle time t 5 minutes and have speedfan monitoring the SSD to stop it turning off so I'll see how that goes anyway.