Hard Drive Heating Up

"Kipper" <Kipper.DeleteThis@Imadethisup.com> writes:
 >I percieved a problem with my new second hard disk heating up. It is still
 >sandwiched between the old HD and the diskette although this situation will
 >not be permanent.

 >I have found 2 utilities which show the temperature of the HD. The reported
 >temp is about 45 - 50 degrees celcius. Does this this seem OK?

Long long ago Motorola introduced some new MECL chips. These things
ran so hot that customers had all kinds of problems and I'm guessing
gave the Motorola sales folks about as much heat as the chips did.
When the next generation of parts came out the new manual went into
lots of detail about taking care of heat, life of parts as they get
hotter and hotter, etc.

Short answer, the hotter it is the sooner it will die, generally.
But many things have gotten much more reliable over the decades.
And with computers, lots of stuff is worthless before it has much
chance of dying.

45-50C isn't uncommon inside cases or on the surface of cpu's with
fans blasting against them.

With drives stacked closely together there isn't much opportunity
for heat to get out other than by convection through the case and
into the metal cage holding the drive.

If it is a problem there are pretty cheap little hard drive coolers
now that are one or two fans on a sort-of flat sheet of aluminum
that bolts onto one side of the drive. That blows air directly
against the surface of the drive and should help cool it down.

I found one of these for about $7 U.S. on the net.
I suspect the temperature on my drives is easily 50C but I haven't
tracked down a utility to tell me. I think MBM will do that but
it had some warnings about turning on the drive temperature checking
and I never tried it.<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->