Does external drive get hot?

[buildingacomputer]

I am using an old IDE drive (7200 rpm, 100 GB) as an USB external drive. I am using an IDE-to-USB converter that plugs into the IDE connector. It is NOT an enclosure.

It gets hot pretty quick. I guess it runs full speed all the time whether data is written to or read from or not. Is this the limitation of the converter? If I use an enclosure, will it spin down when not tranferring data?

How does off-the-shelf external drive work? Does it spin down when not in use?

 

[ShawnD1]

I've had lots of external drives and all of them get hot like that. There's nothing you can do to stop it.

 

[Russwinters]

Newer drives have device configuration overlay modifications in their firmware that will instruct them to spindown when not accessed for "x" amount of time.

Older drives did not have this.


Either way, Older drives tended to get a lot hotter then your average drive used today (although even some new ones can cook pretty good)

overall I wouldn't be worried. Drives are designed to run safely at up to ~55c operating temperature, although I would recommend trying to keep it as cool as possible.


If you are worried, pick up a separate enclosure with a fan, and get your HDD separately. I would recommend this anyways as the drives they use in the prebuilt external HDD are usually of lower quality then drives for OS/OEM use.

 

[sheh]

How do you define "hot"? Can you read the drive temperature through SMART? Depending on room temperature 40-50C could be normal.

Connecting a drive through USB by itself would not change the amount of heat produced. Drives normally spin all the time, whether there's read/write access going on or not. My impression is that going into standby after a few minutes of no use is usually an OS function, maybe with the exception of external enclosures that do it by themselves.

Since in normal usage drives can be accessed frequently for hours I don't think there's an advantage to standby in terms of heat. They are designed to keep on spinning for hours (and days). One advantage I see for standby is if you leave the computer unused without turning it off.

 

[Russwinters]

"Standby" is no longer only a OS only function. All 2.5, 1.8inch drives will automatically park heads when not in use to reduce the chance of headcrash from NRRO (Non-repeatable Runout) AKA: Picking up and moving your laptop around while it's on.


Most 3.5inch now adopted the same behavior.


Hard drives have highly advanced firmware, that is basically an internal OS for the HDD.

HDD do many things very independently of the OS.

They perform self maintenance without your knowledge, are constantly updating logs, tables, etc

They have accelerometers (same like is used in wii remote, only wii remote has more) to detect abnormal amounts of movement/vibration so that they can park the heads in emergency (this isn't fullproof of course.)