My Western Digital Black runs very hot - is this normal?

[rosarian007]

I have an old Western Digital 1.0TB SATA / 32MB Cache WD1001FALS black drive that runs too hot for the touch. If you put your finger on the drive when it has been on for a while you have to eventually release because it is too hot. I decided to remove the drive from the system.

Do I have a defective drive?

 

[VirtualLarry]

No, those old WD drives ran fairly hot. The bearings may be going, if it's older. Also, what kind of chassis is it in? Is it bolted onto metal? Some of the cooling of 3.5" HDDs is conductive onto the chassis.

Failing that, they make fans that strap onto 3.5" HDDs.

 

[corkyg]

Not necessarily. A normal temp for a WD Black is 55C = 131F. That would be very hot to touch, and too hot for prolonged touch. How much ambient ventilation did it get? Cooling?

 

[rosarian007]

Grrrr. I have been holding off on the two 120MM fans.

 

[killster1]

Maybe your fingers are to sensitive ya 120mm passing over it a heatsink would be standard practice, sounds like no airflow

 

[Red Squirrel]

Those drives do run quite hot without proper ventilation. When I swapped out a batch of em from a raid array for other drives, I kept them around as backup drives. In the raid array they were fine as the server had lot of ventilation, but on the backup dock there was no ventilation, and they actually melted the plastic of the dock. I had to add a fan blowing air over the drive.

 

[Ketchup]

My WD Black 1 TB is right up there with my 4 TB Toshiba drive for heat. A SMART scan will tell you if it's too hot (which are available just about anywhere), but the way you describe it sounds pretty normal for that drive.

 

[rosarian007]

I had the Western Digital Black Drive, 1TB WD1001FALS SATA / 32MB Cache with a Hitachi Deskstar 1TB May 2007 SATA 3.0 7200RPM together in my Corsair Carbide R100.

I took the drives out because they got really hot and I was afraid they were going to melt the plastic hard drive rails. :-(

 

[topmysteries5]

I have same WD Black WD1001FALS. It was purchased way back in 2010 (not using anymore). At 28c room temp, it idles at 38c and maximum temp was 44c when copying 150GB of data to this drive. Temps above 47c will be always bad for any HDD. You can add a 90/120mm fan with good airflow to it to cool it.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I had the Western Digital Black Drive, 1TB WD1001FALS SATA / 32MB Cache with a Hitachi Deskstar 1TB May 2007 SATA 3.0 7200RPM together in my Corsair Carbide R100.

I took the drives out because they got really hot and I was afraid they were going to melt the plastic hard drive rails. :-(

I'm not intimately familiar with that case (although I have I think the same one behind me, but I haven't given it a through look-see yet), but generally-speaking, if you have two 7200RPM HDDs, you DO NOT want to stack them DIRECTLY on top of each other in a chassis, WITHOUT active cooling. That's just asking for problems. Generally-speaking, again, 5400RPM HDDs run cool enough, that this isn't a problem.

Most cases with stacked 3.5" HDD bays, do have a provision for a fan mount, either an 80mm or a 120mm, even if the chassis doesn't ship with one pre-installed. Only the poorly-designed cases will lack a chassis fan mount near their drive cages, or they will utilize an alternative means of mounting 3.5" HDDs. (For example, one of my cases has a mounting frame tray, that then screws flat against the back of the mobo tray area. There's one 2.5", and a couple of 3.5" trays.)

 

[mikeymikec]

Huh. The WDB I bought in 2010 (WD1003FZEX) is currently idling at 31C without any dedicated cooling (the case has a chassis fan mounted in the opposite corner to the drive).

 

[bonehead123]

The older ones do run hot, but I recently purchased 2x current-gen 2TB Black spinners and they never felt warm to the touch when I had them laying on my desk while I formatted them and copied over about 1.1 TB of files to each of them with a USB adapter (as a test before installing them into my case)... I had them laying upside down though (pcb facing up). I have not measured their temps yet, but will soon....

After I installed them in my case, with 1 empty slot between them, same result, however my case is huge and has a bunch of 140mm HAF fans blowing tons of air around at 1000-1500 rpms, so that helps too.....