TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

I was playing Stalker yesterday and as I played it got jerkier and jerkier, like it was loading all the time, then I decided to exit the game and noticed the computer was kind of acting strange so I restarted it. Well when I restarted it, it saw NO harddrives, so I opened up to see if a connection came loose. After determining that no connection was loose I noticed my hard drives were extremly warm if not hot. I had them close to gether but seperated them so they could get better airflow, but Im wondering if there is a solution to keep them cooler as I have a fan right next to them, is there a better way? Is there a running temp for HD's?

A program such as Speedfan will monitor SMART and give you the temperature of the drive(s). You can also buy some heat spreaders to go on drives, and specific HD cooling systems. Really though I'd just not have them on top of each other and see if you can arrange an intake case fan to blow across them. Something like a 120mm (even 80 would work) where you have an arrangement like HD:Space:HD so you can get some airflow inbetween them.

Thats what I did, I think it'll work, thanks for the info....

Yep, should work fine. For a while I ran 2 hds on top of each other because the case didn't offer any other solutions, one of them died. But I think that may have been more that it was one of those IBM Deskstar drives that had so many problems than the heat. But I don't think really high temps are all that good for drives - but there is some indication in a google research paper that suggests really cool drives have shortened life spans too.

Anyway, with them seperated they should be fine, and with a fan that is even better.

I used to run a floppy-HDD-HDD config, and once, when I was making backups, the HDD slowed to a 1mbps transfer speed crawl, which improved when I brought a table fan over to blow at it.

Given that there isn't anymore 3.5" space on the case, I just changed it to HDD-floppy-HDD config, and that solved the problem.

Also, the fan blowing right next to them, is it blowing at it? New cases these days have a fan or two dedicated to just moving the air between HDDs, but my experience says that you'd need a pretty powerful fan for it....