Hard drive and heat - Have the manufactures reached the limit?

As the title suggests, this thread I am hoping to see who else have had heat related problems with their hard drives. Currently, I have 2, a 40gb and an 80gb for LWA (Laptop - the clevo), the 40gb is a great runner, works well and has XP home (that came with the laptop) on it and a 80gb that I just plonked XP Pro on it.

Now my problem is that the 80gb works well, ok for a while about a few weeks in this one (LWA) and suddently, it crashes. Windows stops working, so does the drive and Windows starts up slowly. When it was in Overloard, I got the occasional problem of "overheating" which was solved by tipping up the computer infront of the fan and blasting cold air at it for about half an hour. Start it up and it is as good as new.

In LWA, that isn't an option. The hard drive gets hot and stays hot and it appears that using the fan doesn't work either! What tends to happen in this case is the hard drive will crash. If I restart, windows will start extremely slowly which it'll probably take 20minutes to start, before it is about 1 or 2 (and hibernation tends to be very slow when in use. About 10 minutes to hibernate LWA on both drives, anyone know why?).
If I take the hard drive out, put it in my caddy and leave it to cool for a day, it gets back to normal and the process starts all over again.


Laptop drives and their formfactors aren't the only ones affected. My sisters friend from her school talked to me on MSN yesterday on her desktop hard drive which is 300gbs in size. She has had 4 crashes so far and she finds it very fustrating too. She also does what I use to do, reformat and start again (after transferring critical data over). Her drive is about 1 to 2 years old. Mine is about a year old now and came from a Ferrari laptop which was also giving the drive problems. An identcal drive is I believe fitted to my fathers later ferrari laptop and he has had a few problems with it.

Does anyone think that this is the limits that laptop drives can take? Or does anyone think that the manufactured computer hardware is getting hotter, so dissapating the heat is getting ever more problematic and leads to equipemt failure?
Or do you have any other theroies? I always thought my one is due to heat, because the plates where the hard drive is can be very hot to touch after some time.


Your thoughts?

I don't think that hard drives have necessarily hit their limits - according to their own specs they should be able to run under room temperatures for years straight. What I do think is becoming more common is lack of proper air circulation.. I know for one that laptop manufacturers don't often put in adequate cooling (my HP laptop ran hot to the touch even when it was on a nice clean desk with a good clearance, and neither do many common desktop manufacturers.

My solution? You can get cooling trays that you can put under laptops that constantly blow air on the bottom, increasing circulation. Alternatively, you can get something like the laptinator to give the laptop more clearance on the bottom (and great when you're using it out and about).


For the desktop, I'd pop that bad boy out and give the circulation a reworking. Bind cabling together, make sure you've got a good air flow (fan in the front sucking in, fan in the back blowing out - at least) and see where it goes from there.

Or it could be a bad drive and you just need to RMA it.

RMA it? By that you mean.......???

Stands for returned materials authorization or some such - essentially all drives and such hardware have some sort of warranty on them - RMAing something is sending it back for replacement/repair during your warranty period.


Useless if the warranty is over, mind you.

Good point, but my problem gets a little complicated. It came with an Acer laptop, which has seen its 80gb hard drive displaced. Now my father doesn't really want to have his laptop out of use for some time, he needs them atleast once a month. Acer cannot guarentee a quick turn around which would typically be 10 days IIRC. Now that is for a repitable company bad! I had my PDA returned in little under 5 days and that was a compaq one!

The manufacture is Toshiba, but I am not able to send it back to them, am I?

You're not Toshibas customer, Acer is. The RMA must be done through Acer.

Heat accelerates failure in hard drives.