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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Merkuri" data-source="post: 4824733" data-attributes="member: 41321">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?</blockquote>

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