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What's the safe and acceptable temperature range for my laptop?

  • 500GB hard drive
  • Intel Core i5 2nd generation CPU
  • 6GB RAM ddr3

hdd name- wdc wd5000bpvt-22hxzt1 500.1gb

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  • There are lots of 500GB hard drives out there... Oct 12, 2011 at 6:24
  • Still not enough. Which one? Oct 12, 2011 at 6:28
  • 1
    Every laptop has different cooling architectures. You need to be more explicit in your question.
    – Jin
    Oct 12, 2011 at 6:30
  • added the hdd name, what other details are expected @jin?
    – 168335
    Oct 12, 2011 at 6:32
  • The laptop model will be useful.
    – Jin
    Oct 12, 2011 at 6:37

4 Answers 4

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http://www.wdc.com/wdsearch/search.aspx?sc=&sl=en-US&sq=how+hot+hard+drive I did this search, and most of the internal Disk items have a range to About 60-65*C.

Drives that come in a box or are sealed in another container (like passport), are listed at around 40*C, (external ambient) this is probably different because the drive itself inside the box , will reach higher temps.

The sure to be non-operational temps I saw were 70*C, by then I assume not only would it be non-operational then :-) but not very likly to work later either.

In the warrenty section, where I suspected I might find a no-warrenty policy for a drive so overheated, there was nothing specific about it.

I like my drive to be 40*C and down, I have seen them run just fine for days at 50*C , I agree with Charles, your going to have a lot more problems than that if the hard drive gets to the non-operational temperature, on the other hand, I think that many smaller devices (non-desktop) are unnessisarily harsh on some things.

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Laptop already contains temperature control mechanism. If your laptop gets overheated then the BIOS gives you the warning and turns off your laptop automatically.

Every brand laptop has different temperatures. You don't need to bother about it.

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  • Not many have temperature control mechanism for hard drives, which is the title of the question!
    – AndrejaKo
    Oct 12, 2011 at 8:53
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In general, if your hard disk is getting hot enough to fry, other components in your laptop are going to go first. Capacitors will start popping in the power circuitry and your CPU will start going before the hard disk will suffer.

I've seen some research results from Google's hard disks, and surprisingly, cooler does not necessarily correlate with longer life, which is most likely what you're after. The single largest factor in a hard disk's life is the batch quality. Unfortunately you have essentially zero control over this, and there's no practical way to measure it, aside from running a bunch of the disks for years and seeing how quickly they fail on average.

That said, laptops do get hot, especially if used for gaming, and I do recommend some variety of external cooling if you're going to be using this computer for long periods at high performance levels like 3d games or HD movies.

Check your laptop's manual to see how it deals with overheat conditions, as it may do processor stepping, or take more aggressive countermeasures if the chassis overheats.

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According to this datasheet: http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701278.pdf

0 - 60 C (operating)
-40 - 65 C (non-operating)

That's only the hard drive, other components have different limits, and will have different temperature.

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