The problem of heating: the temperature of the hard drive

Active advertising of their products by the manufacturers of cooling systems for the main components of the personal computer has done its job: even now the student knows that the CPU and the chip of a powerful video card are hot during operation. Basic knowledge of electrical engineering is enough to understand the relationship of frequency, current and heat dissipation. The more transistors in the chip, the higher the level of its heating, as a rule. Consequently, it is impossible to do without active cooling. So there are "cunning" designs of cooler radiators, fan blades developers intricately bend, change their location and quantity, and heat pipes are not used only by a lazy producer.

But if this does not arise, then why does the temperature of the hard drive increase? After all, its microcircuits do not have millions of transistors. There are completely different processes: the high speed of rotation of magnetic disks, the heat-generating engine, the hermetic construction and the frame of the reading heads, which affects the air flow - these are the main reasons that cause the temperature of the hard disk to increase. Here it is important to point out that not always its increase indicates any malfunctions.

The temperature of the hard drive in a working computer can not but increase - this is normal, even inevitable. The exception is practically cold models with solid-state memory, but so far they have not received mass distribution due to the unreasonably high cost of each gigabyte of available capacity.

To find out what the operating temperature of the hard disk is, you need a program that can read data from the built-in thermal sensor of the hard drive. There are quite a lot of such applications: AIDA64, HD Sentinel, Crystal Disk-Info, etc. For example, to determine the temperature of the hard disk with the help of "Aida", it is necessary to proceed after the program start on the path "Computer - Sensors". The temperature list will contain the hard disk readings.

Now several features:

- the measurement should be performed after half an hour after turning on the computer - during this time the device will enter the steady mode;

- it is obvious that in the hot season the heating will be higher;

- the more intensively the disk is used, the more heat it allocates, therefore, in order to know the peak value, it is necessary to start defragmenting or scanning files with antivirus for 15-20 minutes.

Thus, to determine the heating level, it is necessary to load the disk for a while and use the selected program to read the data of the temperature sensor.

The following question is natural: "What should be the normal temperature of the hard disk" ?. It is recommended not to reinvent the wheel, but to go to the manufacturer's website (for example, Seagate, WD), choose your model and read the specifications. As a rule, the permissible level of heating is indicated there. Accordingly, it is not recommended to exceed it.

In most cases, heating to 40-45 degrees is permissible. If the growth continues above 50, then an additional blow to the device should be installed. Note that sometimes excessive heating indicates a malfunction of the disk mechanics.