Speed Kills? With Hard Drives It’s Heat!
January 27, 2007 by Victoria Stankard
Filed under Hard Drive How To's, Hard Drive Reviews
A few months ago I bought an internal thermometer for my computer. I was told by Malcolm our hard drive recovery engineer that the most common reason for hard disk failure was heat. I was shocked to find the internal temperature of my machine was 120 degrees! How did it get so hot?
When it was put together a couple of years ago it was pretty standard fare, 3ghz Intel Pentium IV processor, 1gb RAM with video, sound and network on the motherboard. After a while I put in an ATI 9800 video card with 256MB as well as an Audigy 2 sound card and a gigabit LAN card to match a new router upgrade. Little did I know that those items raised my tempature internally. Not knowing any better I didn’t add any extra fans or anything.
A couple of days ago my hard drive crashed see my blog post:Data Recovery Case Study- My Own Machine to read all about it. It turns out that the platters had warped due to heat. At the time all I knew was that the platters needed to be swapped it wasn’t until later that I found out why. I replaced the drive (a 250GB Maxtor IDE) with 2 160GB Western Digitals set up with a software RAID 1 which is a mirror. I was determined not to go through the humiliation of loosing data while working for a hard drive recovery company again.
Two weeks ago my power supply went, taking with it my video card and creating some problems with my sound card. I went ahead and ordered a new XPS from Dell, but asked the guys at DTI to fix up my machine for gaming. It was at this time that they started to tell me about heat and how the case I was using (A big Thermaltake) didn’t have enough fans.
Now I looked at the internal temp of my new Dell and sure enough it is 105 degrees in there. This goes to show that we need to educate ourselves on how best to deal with heat. This machine has Serial ATA so the drives are big and fast, but they get blazing hot. I installed hard drive fans on them I snagged them from Tiger Direct for 7 bucks. Because Dell has a good setup with the proper balance between positive and negative air flow, this helped a bunch. Right now it is at a solid 75 degrees.
Understand that there are many other methods of cooling that can be added to almost ANY computers including the case or the housing itself that will drop the computers core temperature drastically. Aluminum cases are becoming very popular as they can run up to 6 times cooler then a standard steel case.
The one thing that I didn’t understand was how does a platter warp? It seems that with usage the drive heats up then as it turns off or goes into hibernation, the hard disk cools down. This can cause minimal warping. When I say minimal we’re talking less than a millimeter. The hard disk drive is a very precise piece of technology that is born to fail. To learn more about hard drives see Dick Correa’s post about hard drives with bad sectors . It is actually a pretty scary post which should motivate you to get a good backup plan going if you don’t have one already.
If your hard drive is clicking stop what you are doing and call us at 727-345-9665! Click here for more info on Hard Drive Recovery
[...] As a data recovery company, dtidata.com sees a lot of hard drive failures. As I said in my post: Speed Kills With Hard Drives Its Heat, I went over how heat affects hard disk [...]
[...] Here are some facts about Toshiba’s newest laptop hard drives: The MK2035GSS, possesses the largest capacity of its class, 200GB, using only two platters which seems a little scary. While this drive has the capacity, it also gets hot! We all know what heat does to a hard drive, If you are unsure read this post: Speed Kills? With Hard Drives It’s Heat! [...]
[...] Fujitsu makes a solid laptop hard drive. Like any disk, their greatest enemy is heat. Heat Kills Hard Drives was one of my most read articles. With Fujitsu drives, when they fail, they fail all the way. We see [...]
[...] Foldable and compact, the Vantec LapCool 4 is ideal for those wanting a cooler notebook but want to keep size to a minimum. Dual, adjustable fans keep your laptop cool while retractable legs can keep your laptop at a level that is comfortable. Featuring a 3-port USB 2.0 hub and an 8 in 1 card reader makes the LapCool 4 perfect as a portable docking station. The LapCool 4 also includes 2 storage compartments at its base, well suited for storing memory cards and cables. Easy to store, easy to carry, easy to use, the Vantec LapCool 4 is the easy choice for a laptop cooler. Remember that Heat kills hard drives! [...]
[...] you have to understand that a hard drives worst enemy is heat. I am sure you have seen it maybe in a cheap frying pan. You heat it up cook in it and then turn [...]
[...] is a serious problem for people, cars and especially computers and hard drives. In my post Speed Kills With Hard Drives Its Heat, I talk about how heat can be very bad for hard drives. Today we are going to look at the world [...]
Heat explained: Why is heat bad for your hard drive. The main reason is anything that is hot expands,this is bad for the metalic platters holding the magnetically charged data. Hard drives will begin to have problems reading and writing on track. They will have to recallibrate to find there plot on the drive. This can cause fluctuations in the head movements and may cause damage to the read elements or the magnetically charged platters. Conversley, the drive manufacturers are aware of this, they do consider this and make compansation for the read/write element. Unfortunately, temperatures in drives that are not ventilated exceed any compinsation and catostrophic failures can occur.
Hi!
I just bought a new dell studio 17 and I had a choice between a 500GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM) and a Dual: 640GB (2x 320) SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM). They cost exactly the same and I was wondering why??? Isn’t having two hard drives better? More capacity more backup, more safety?
Does this have anything to do with the fact that hard drives heat up and having two would cause my laptop to heat up faster? I don’t want to ever have to replace any parts, like metal anythings.
Would you say it is even worth it for me to have a 500 or 640gb hard drive? I’m an architecture student using autocad/autocad3d, maya, revit and another program I forgot its name (will be using it later on). I also like to play World of Warcraft, I like music, but wouldn’t keep videos on my laptop really. The third option was a 320gb. I was planning on keeping the laptop for 2-3yrs.
Thanks so much for any input in advance!! I would appreciate any input from anyone!!
~Cindy
Cindy, your best bet is to see if you can get your 2 drives set up in a RAID 1 or a mirrored RAID. This will protect your files. I just bought a Dell laptop and the hard drive died within 2 weeks! I hadn’t had enough time to set up my backups yet and had to have an engineer recover the data. talk about embarrassing! Since you will have large files with CAD programs you will need storage, that’s for sure, but really 320 GB is a lot of CAD drawings. I also suggest you get an external hard drive for backing up your critical files. The 320 GB drives set up in RAID 1 would be my choice. Don’t do a spanned set up 640 GB with 2 320 drives, because that is the most expensive type of data recovery, a RAID 0 or spanned set is dangerous!