overheating HD = death?

[zrikz]

So about a month ago I had a TB hard drive die.. ugh np, because it starting clicking randomly so I had the time to back it up, luckily it was brand new and not full of stuff.

Last week one of my 750's began to malfunction and click, ugh, ok.. I managed to get it backed up and it finally died completely last night.

Woke up this morning to do a few things and my computer was non responsive, so I forced it off, rebooted and it sat there. While it was sitting there I ripped the side off and looked at my drive bay, and the fan behind the HD's was no longer turning and the main drive was scorching hot.

So I left it off for a while and then turned it back on and it managed to boot up, but it clicked a couple of times during the process...

Do you think too much damage has been done already? It did boot up, but I'm worried it's too late for it and I should just go ahead and back it all up to my other computer and mark it off the list too.

Seems like the fan must randomly work, because about 3 days ago I opened it up and it was spinning just fine.

 

[crazyassazian]

Hmm, really? I mean HDDs in OEM Dells, HPs, whatever....etc. don't have any active cooling on them. They work just fine. Temps can play a role in premature failure, though. I'm guessing you got a case of badluck. I'm guessing from your sig that 1TB is probably one of the Seagates that had the firmware problem. You should check the serial on that. I'm gonna make my next guess that the 750gb was a Samsung. I don't know about any reliability issues with the F1's but the lower models might have lingering issues.

 

[dydx]

You dont really need any active cooling on HDDs unless it's a high performance system and the inside case temp is really high. Some people tend to cool their drives too much. According to the Google hard drive study, I believe it showed that statistically, drives were less likely to die if you kept them in the range of 35C to 45C.

If you mean scorching hot as in you cant keep your hand on the drive for more than a few seconds, then yea, that's pushing it. Interestingly, I used to have a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop which had a poor design in that the hard drive was placed very closed to the graphics card so that its temperature would be at 55C to 60C. I ran it like that no problems for over a year until I realized, then put active cooling on it. Regardless, you should always have your data backed up anyways.

 

[zrikz]

You dont really need any active cooling on HDDs unless it's a high performance system and the inside case temp is really high. Some people tend to cool their drives too much. According to the Google hard drive study, I believe it showed that statistically, drives were less likely to die if you kept them in the range of 35C to 45C.

If you mean scorching hot as in you cant keep your hand on the drive for more than a few seconds, then yea, that's pushing it. Interestingly, I used to have a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop which had a poor design in that the hard drive was placed very closed to the graphics card so that its temperature would be at 55C to 60C. I ran it like that no problems for over a year until I realized, then put active cooling on it. Regardless, you should always have your data backed up anyways.

Hmm good to know regarding the temperature... hard to back up your data when the two drives that were backing everything up die... 1.75 TB worth of storage gone in basically 2 weeks. Managed to get nearly all of it, but I have like 2gb of free space on my other drives now =/ Now I wait for the RMA process on both of them.