i have a general question about the normal operating temp of a hard drive. my hd with the os and all of the programs on it usually runs about 45C-47C depending on what all i'm doing and i was wondering if this was normal or if it was hot. i wanted to know because i converted that to F and it was around 110 degrees which seems kind of warm. can one of the techie experts help me out here. if anyone was wondering how to find the hard drive temps, i use a program called PC Wizard 2004 available here. it has a bunch of other features besides temperatures too and i think its a somewhat useful program.

mmmmm hardrives do get hot .. which can slow or mess things up ... along with ram.. you can get addons to keep your pc cool..

add extra fans to create a wind tunnel in your pc ..lol

you can buy a clip on fan for hardrives which help it stay cool if your pc is on for long times..

and you can buy memory cooling things...

have a look around http://www.dabs.com

I recall 50-55C being a normal average range for modern hard drives. My Laptop HD gets up to 60-70C, and runs like a champ. So, I'd say you are doing pretty good. I would get really worried if your HD started breaking 70C for longevity reasons.

If you are still concerned, try moving it to a different spot, away from other warm components, or near a vent, or you can buy a HD fan.

its a dell so i can't add more fans without modding the case which i don't want to do cause i plan on selling it. once in a while i take the little flap off the front and put a 10" fan up to it and blow air into the case and that lowers the temp to about 36 or 38C on the os drive. i'm not really worried much about the ram cause the one dimm has its own heat spreader which works quite well and the other dimm is small so it can't hold much, although it probably still gets warm. does the operating temp of around 45C seem hot though or is it normal

See above ^.

I just read something that said IBM drives have a critical temperature of 85C, and Maxtors 255C. So, it really depends. What is the hard drive make/model?

do you know what the temps are for seagate and western digital.

I downloaded that app that shows your harddrive temp in the task bar and I have 2 drives 80 gig maxtor on the bottom which was showing temp of about 29c to 32c, the 60 gig maxtor above it 2 slots was showing 49c to 53c, both are 7200rpm drives, I thought it was a bit high so I got heatsink and dual fan set that attaches to the underside of the drive and jumpers into the drives powerplug ,the temp now stays steady at 30c on the upper drive. I am more content even if it makes no differance to the drives happiness.LOL

I know they sell fans that slide in like a cd-rom and use the regular power plug. Dell cases are not the best to work with. Keep it original if you do plan to sell it.

Good Luck.

Hard drive enclosures ar available for those of you that dont want to mod your case. The enclosure fits into a 5 1/2" bay and the HDD goes in the enclosure which has heat sinks and fans to cool that puppy down.

I have one of the hd enclosers although the noise of the fan is pretty loud if you have a quite system.