HDD's And Heat

[dvslats]

Could one of you fine Gents (or ladies) recommend a utilitie or hardware that can monitor the temperature of a HDD or for that matter the case. In just a little over a year the third hard drive in my comp is starting to fail. Yesterday the event viewer showed about thirty five bad block notices. I'm thinking that by the third HDD, if they were bad from manufacture, my luck would have changed. It's has to be something else. The system is a dual boot with two seperate drives. I have noticed that when the CD tray is open to remove a disk, it is actually hot. This is directly above the two drives. This can't be good. I just noticed this because lately I've been using those flash thumb drives, and last weekend actually needed the CD drive to copy from.
Thanks, Dv

[Ridge]

ASUS PC Probe II might detect it..

[stansdds]

You can also try HWMonitor from CPUID.

http://www.cpuid.com/hwmonitor.php

[dvslats]

Thanks Ridge and stansdds, I tried both of these and pretty much got the same numbers. About 55° C.
Got another 163 bad blocks this morning. Ship is going down by the bow ...Have to start grabbing files.

[Ridge]

Happened to me last week, too. My WD 500Gb started having issues retrieving files...my backup that normally took 30 minutes started telling me it'd take 24 hours...stuck it in the freezer for an hour, plugged it back in and was able to retrieve the last of the files.

[hey_moe]

I have tried a few of those programs but have found this one to be the best >> http://www.lavalys.com/ you can DL a free copy to see if ya like it. This program also has it's own stress test and can tell ya just about anything you want to know:ernae:...Mike

[dvslats]

Luckily I was able to get all the precious files off of the now defunct HDD. Installed an older 80 gig drive and added two more fans. One's a pusher, the other a puller. The temp on the hard drive is now at a respectable 27° C. I'm going to leave this one in the comp for awhile and see how long it lasts. 55° C was at the high end of the manufacture's recommended operating limit. Sure hope this was the culprit.
At least I have reloading down to a science now.
Thanks for the help, Dv

[dvslats]

Well, it has been a little over a week now...running my box twenty four hours a day with only the monitor scheduled to turn off, no low power state for anything else. The 80 Gig drive I put in for this little test was one of my previously crippled HDD's. When it was re installed, I ran Windows CHKDSK to re-map the bad blocks. Also made a note of the quantity of these. Then I came up with a little torture test...did everything possible to cause writes and re-writes to the disk. Ran CHKDSK daily (which is stressful in itself) to check the amount of bad blocks. Defragged also. Before defrag would hang when the disk was loaded with bad blocks. My highest temperature was 27°C and the lowest 23°C.
The good news...at these temps, on a crippled disk, I have not seen any increase on the amount of bad blocks. :mixedsmi: Windows defrag runs through the drive in about 3 to 4 minutes now. I'm sure the daily defrsgs help this, but for an injured drive I'm pretty amazed.
Guess it's safe to say temperatures really do make a difference. I have always ignored this in the past, but on older hardware me thinks it wasn't much of an issue. The more intense speed of the latest stuff generates many more BTU's from what I've read and really makes cooling important. An old guy learns something new, the hard way. Now I know why Moe runs liquid cooling for his Magnum set up.
Time to go look for a deal on a new hard drive, hopefully the last time at least for a few years...
Dv