case temps

[DJFuji]

I'm probably being overly paranoid about this, but I dont want to lose a hard drive because the temps are too high in my case. I used to have the hard drive rack outside of the case with a desktop cooling fan (1' X 1' circular fan) in front of it to ensure that the 74g raptor and four 160g/7200/8s were being cooled properly. I did this because i realized that without active cooling, the hard drives were getting REALLY hot to the touch and one of them actually started developing bad sectors.

Recently bought a thermaltake 120mm intake fan which i installed in the front of the case. It sits right in front of the hdd rack so it blows air through the drives and exhausts in the rear through another 120mm and the PSU. I don't remember what the temps were like before i put the side panel back on, but with everything all setup, i'm running at what ASUS PC Probe says is (idle) 47C CPU (AMD64 3200+ newcastle) and 37C on mobo temp. This is with the intake fan running at around 1600 rpms. If i kick it up to 2600, it drops a few degrees more.

Read something somewhere that said you should be running a case temp within 10 degrees of ambient temps. Well it's 77 degrees F in the room right now so that would put my case temps at +20 degrees.

Someone who knows what theyre talking about, please reassure me that i'm not going to cause premature failure on my hard drives...

 

[Navid]

Someone may say that 10 degrees higher than room temperature is achievable. But, they cannot say that is a good/bad temperature. Room temperature can vary from place to place. But, the failure of a component has nothing to do with it.

Anyway, don't you have SMART on those hard drives?
Many new hard drives have it and you can use it to monitor the temperature of your hard drive instead of just the case.

Download and install Everest. Run oit and look under "Storage" and "SMART". If your drives have it, you can see the temperature there.

If your drives have the SMART capability, you can use Motherboard Monitor to show your hard drives temperatures on your taskbar all the time.

The motherboard temperature is monitored by a sensor somewhere on your motherboard. The temperature of that sensor is not a good representation of your hard drive temperature.

 

[Ike0069]

Well, I imagine they meant 10C as that would be more realistic. I normally run around 10C higher than ambient for my case at idle, and 15C or more at full load. Depending on the case layout and what you have in the case (high end VC's can produce alot of heat) some cases could actually see close to ambient temps at idle. But this is not critical for a stable computer.
Now I will say that you most likely don't want to let your ambient room temp get much higher because it could be hard to keep everything cool at full load if Ambient is 30C.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Get Speedfan and you can manually adjust the front intake through software and monitor the SMART status of your drives.

Check this case review at SPCR for some interesting discussion about drive cooling.

Ralf Hutter
Intel says you can run your CPU up to 70°C, AMD says 90°C is OK but most enthusiasts feel uncomfortable if their CPUs are running more than 70% of the max recommended temperature.

Now extrapolate this to the HDD, quite likely the most delicate piece of hardware in a PC. Here you've got a mechanical device that is supposed to run at incredibly tight tolerances, heating and cooling, stopping and starting, and it contains all your data (that most likely hasn't been backed up). Why someone would be content to run such a delicate, important piece of hardware like an HDD at near the Maximum Recommended Temperature and yet be worried about whether their CPU goes over 50°C is hard for me to comprehend.

- M4H

 

[VirtualLarry]

My HDs are directly in front of my intake fans in the lower front of my mid-tower case, and their SMART temps are nominally around 32-35C, possibly getting over 40C under heavy load. Case ambient (measured on the mobo somewhere) ranges from 34C-38C, CPU diode temps on my Athlon XP2000+ range from 39C-46C. I have power-management/throttling/stopclock/disconnect disabled, so the CPU doesn't go into any sort of power-throttling mode. Also have a blowhole at the top of the case, if I cover that, my temps rise about 2-3C.

 

[DJFuji]

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
Get Speedfan and you can manually adjust the front intake through software and monitor the SMART status of your drives.

Check this case review at SPCR for some interesting discussion about drive cooling.

Ralf Hutter
Intel says you can run your CPU up to 70°C, AMD says 90°C is OK but most enthusiasts feel uncomfortable if their CPUs are running more than 70% of the max recommended temperature.

Now extrapolate this to the HDD, quite likely the most delicate piece of hardware in a PC. Here you've got a mechanical device that is supposed to run at incredibly tight tolerances, heating and cooling, stopping and starting, and it contains all your data (that most likely hasn't been backed up). Why someone would be content to run such a delicate, important piece of hardware like an HDD at near the Maximum Recommended Temperature and yet be worried about whether their CPU goes over 50°C is hard for me to comprehend.

- M4H

Thanks M4H. I actually have the 3700AMB case and so far i love it. The front intake fans are great for keeping hard drives cool.

Navid, I downloaded everest and SMART is reporting hdd temps at what looks to be 22-33 degrees for all of my drives. This is at idle with intake fan at full speed, but I'm thinking i should be safe if these temps are correct. The only thing that throws me off a bit is that Everest's "value" and "worst" columns seem to be reporting back erroneous figures. I would assume that "worst" is the worst point that particular sensor has reached, but it always shows "253". I wonder if its some default value.

As far as the case temps, i'm still running 34/93 temps or so (right now intake is at fullspeed), but i suppose that that's not bad for an A64 3200+ with an AIW9600, four 7200/8s, and one 74g raptor. And aside from the PSU i only have one intake and one exhaust.