Hard drive advice - may have overheated

[Merkuri]

Last weekend I noticed the side of my computer was really hot. It's right under my desk and I often rest my foot against its side, and it was almost to the point where it was so hot I couldn't touch it for an extended period of time (not quite that hot, but getting there). I made a mental note to upgrade the cooling system, thinking the computer I had bought this past winter wasn't handling the hotter weather very well, but didn't think too much of it.

Then two days ago the computer started acting really strange - programs would freeze and take forever to respond, and after I rebooted it refused to start up, saying it had a problem reading the hard drive.

This was in the morning before work, so I shut it down and left it alone all day while I was at work, then when I got home I opened up the side of the PC and set up a small desk fan to blow into the open case while I booted the machine. It worked. While I had the case open I noticed that none of the fans inside were running except the one on the CPU and the ones in the power supply. The four case fans were stopped.

I examined the insides of the PC more closely and discovered that while all four fan plugs were plugged into each other they weren't plugged into anything else. I grabbed one of the lose power cables, connected it into the set of fan plugs, and after that they all turned on. The PC was noticably cooler to the touch and the hard drive was reporting a much more reasonable temperature (25-35 C), even after I closed up the case and took away the desk fan.

I have no idea how long the fans were unplugged. I feel like it's highly unlikely that they'd become unplugged on their own, but the last time I was inside the PC was probably a month ago, and I also find it highly unklikely that I'd only notice the extra heat last weekend if it had been running without fans for a month. No one else ever opens my computer but me, so no chance anyone else could have done it. I guess I have to blame gremlins.

My question is, could I have done permanent damage to my hard drive? Are modern drives smart enough to detect high heat and shut down to prevent permantent damage? It appears to be working fine now, but should I be looking for a new one? It'd be a shame since the PC and the hard drive are only about six months old, but I'd rather not find out the hard way that my hard drive is now a time bomb waiting to lose all of my data in a few weeks/months/days. (I do run backups on a weekly basis to an external hard drive.)

Should I play it safe and buy a new drive and transfer all of my files over while it's still working, or do you think it still has a few years of life left in it and I shouldn't worry about it as long as I don't stupidly unplug the fans again?

 

[ssampier]

All hard drives die, it's not a matter of if, but when.

I would say that your data is probably fine. Believe me I have run a whole server room in less than optimal conditions--an ac unit went out and had to use fans-- for a longer period with little to no damage.

That said hard drives are cheap. You might as well buy a monster sized drive to store all your data. Use your existing drive to store the os and programs. This assumes your current drive is 7200 RPM and SATA II. If not, you could use the new drive with both os, programs, and data.

Seagate Barracuda 1 TB Internal hard drive - 300 MBps - 7200 rpm

 

[babomb]

Hard drives always die eventually. It's possible that you've shortened its life a little, but if it's working now, it's probably fine. As mentioned above, hard drives are pretty cheap. You can always buy a new one if it makes you feel better.

If only to reassure yourself, run chkdsk (I'm assuming you're running windows.) with the option to scan for bad sectors.

Although this time you came out okay, in the future, you should look into computer heat problems immediately.

 

[Thanee]

Are modern drives smart enough to detect high heat and shut down to prevent permantent damage?

The drives? I don't think so. The mainboard should have an emergency shutdown, though. Mostly to protect the CPU from damage due to overheating.

It appears to be working fine now, but should I be looking for a new one?

No, you should be fine. Just in case, a backup is always a good idea, of course.

(I do run backups on a weekly basis to an external hard drive.)

Ok, that one is covered already.

Should I play it safe and buy a new drive and transfer all of my files over while it's still working, or do you think it still has a few years of life left in it and I shouldn't worry about it as long as I don't stupidly unplug the fans again?

I wouldn't worry about it. I don't think the drives are really endangered that much by the heat (as long as it is not excessive).

Bye
Thanee

 

[Merkuri]

Thanks guys! It makes me feel better to hear other people say my drive is probably fine. I know it'll die eventually, but I just wanted to be sure that doing something like this didn't shorten its lifespan to weeks instead of years.

I'll keep doing my weekly backups, though.