I'm wondering if anyone out there has had any experience with hard drives being tripped because of temperature issues? I have a Maxtor 30GB PATA that has been acting quite strangely with crashes and system lockups in Windows for no explainable reason. Oddly enough, I exhausted my list of corrective solutions thinking it was memory, power or overheating of the CPU and finally ran SeaTools on the hard drive to find out the drive was overtemp. 253 was the temp and I'm not sure if that's Celcius or Farenheit. The drive wouldn't trip SMART but you could hear it click as if it was "parking the heads". Anyone else have experience like this and if the internal temp control of the hard drive is failing?

My experience has been that when a hdd is making a clicking noise it needs to be replaced. Also, I would think that 253 deg is a fahrenheit temp which puts it at about 122 deg C. I googled hdd temps and from what I saw it should be below 55 deg C, which is around 131 F. Other websites suggested too much above 135 to 140 F. will cause hdd failure.

253 is hot in any language. The normal temp for a hard drive is around 35C/95F. A clicking sound usually means the head seek mechanism is having trouble positioning itself due to wear/damage or corrupted media. I would start thinking about backing up your data while you can still get at it and replacing the disk. I would guess a 30Gb disk is fairly old and they dont last forever. Stuart

The drive was an old one laying around and I needed it for a backup master after my 160GB died (Seagate drive from hell). I don't intend on using it to store anything. I must not of been keeping up on things because this was the first I had heard of internal hdd temp monitoring and I guess I need to study up on SMART technology. When did hdd manufactuers first incorporate temp monitoring? I've seen temperature applications for motherboard/cpu monitoring but never hdd and do the new hdd's come with a monitoring app for the drive or is that somehow tracked through SMART?? Thanks for all the info and answers!

Somehow I think that temp sensor is off. Never seen a drive running at 250 deg F. Have you inspected the HD visually? Is the HD getting hot(but no way that hot!)?

I put the hard drive on a stack of newspapers and no fire yet! Just kidding, the drive feels normal so I also suspect it is a faulty sensor and therefore causing the drive to seek landing zone and is why you hear the noise. According to Wikipedia, SMART is capable of detecting temp but isn't always implemented because of varying information supplied from hdd vendors, Bios and motherboard manufactuers. I do know the actual hdd diagnostic software is capable of detecting something like this and now know something new.

Try this utility - dtemp - drive temp. It also also has Smart info for each drive. http://private.peterlink.ru/tochinov/ I'm not sure when they started adding a temp sensor onto hard drives. A Maxtor I have that I got in late 99 doesn't have it, but other Maxtors and Seagates I have dating from 2001 or so and newer do. Newer drives keep a log file of Smart info on the drive itself. I was just testing some Seagate drives with the latest Seatools for Dos - it shows the Current and the Worst temp - the highest the drive has been subjected to. One thing I have noticed on several drives that have failed is one of the integrated chips on the logic board got really hot - too hot to keep your finger on. Blowing air directly at the logic board would allow the drive to work normally for a while in the earlier stages of it dying. If the temp sensor is close to such an overheated chip, it would register as hotter than the drive overall is. Run the drive for a while with the logic board upwards - see if any of the ICs get that hot - too hot to keep your finger on.