Harddrive running unusually hot with an enclosure

[TomKazansky]

Hey guys,

I recently purchased a SATA enclosure on newegg, paired up with my old barracuda 160gb from Seagate. At first, there were no problems, but after a few days, the drive would unexpectedly restart and make the "click" sound. I just stopped the drive and pulled it out, and it is running hotter than usual. I can still access the files in the drive, and scans are not showing any bad sectors. The drive does not overheat when I use it in the chassis, but then there's a fan running to cool the drive. Is the enclosure bad? or somehow my drive turned bad? can anyone help?

 

[Blain]

Older Cuda's do run warmish. What enclosure are you using?
Personally, I like to run 3.5" HDs in 5.25" enclosures, to help them run as cool as possible.

 

[aceO07]

I have no experience with using enclosures for drives, though I have external harddrives. See if there's an option for it to sleep when idling.

What do you mean by restart and 'click' sound? Are you sure it's not the sound of it waking up after idling?

You could just leave the enclosure open if it's a just a box with a lid.

 

[SparkyJJO]

does the enclosure have a fan in it? Or is it at least an aluminum one to help with heat dissipation?

 

[andy04]

I have 2 enclosures - 1 is metal body other has a fan. I feel that either is very important

 

[TomKazansky]

Hey Guys,

So i stop running torrents and i also pulled the drive out of the cramped 3.5" space for the drive to breathe. So far, it hasn't restarted in the middle of any kind of operation. It still gets somewhat warm after hours of use though, but not extremely hot. Any of you run torrents via external usb 2.0?

 

[wearetheborg]

I am running torrents on external 3.5 USB enclosure.
Though mine is aluminium AND has a 80mm fan.

 

[TomKazansky]

well, it doesn't matter if the drive is hot or cold, whenever torrents is running on external drive, i can hear the restart click about every 3 minutes or so. It does get VERY hot after an hour on torrents though. I think i'm going to mount a fan and see if it solves the problem.

 

[RebateMonger]

I've had really bad luck running external hard drives without fans. Two out of four LaCie drives (with Seagate 250GB drives inside) failed in one year at one client. These were used for backups, running continuously about six hours per night.

My favorite housing is the Apricorn, sold at Newegg.com. Aluminum housing with a good fan. I'm using a pair of them at home, and I have a couple of them at clients.

If the Apricorn didn't require an external power supply, it would be perfect. My dog ate the power cord on my first home housing, so I had to buy another one just to have one working power supply.