• Professorozone@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    I didn’t know hard drive overheating was a thing. Should I be worried that my 5 year old hard drive is about to overheat. I mean is this actually a floppy disk or something?

    • melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      19 hours ago

      it is a thing, but any competently designed computer should have things in place to prevent this.

      unless you’re an arrogant dipshit and disable all the hardware safeties on your computer to make it go faster and wear harder.

    • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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      20 hours ago

      When an HDD works continuously it can heat up to above 60 °C if proper air circulation is not allowed, which can cause a very premature failure. In fact, it should be kept under 40 °C to achieve the intended lifespan. Unfortunately, PC cases are usually not great at removing heat from the HDD by default.

      As for your drive, it most likely has a temperature sensor so it can be displayed by various utilities.

      • Estebiu@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        13 hours ago

        I have a 12v fan running at 5v spitting air on my hdds, and that’s enough for them to go from 55°C to 29°C, lol.

        • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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          11 hours ago

          I did that too, the tiny fan is pretty much silent at 5V. The HDD has so much surface area it only needs a little air circulation.

        • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          21 hours ago

          no. but generally spinning things that spin at several thousands of RPM that are spinning on a bearing, that no longer have a bearing usually sort of uh, tend to be VERY noisy.

          • Professorozone@lemmy.world
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            21 hours ago

            Ok, but do you know anyone this has happened to? I don’t and I have some pretty old drives I still use. I tend to just buy more. Also most drives these days are solid state aren’t they? This just feels like a low probability event to me. Overheating RAM or the CPU or GPU, sure, but hard drive?

            • melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              19 hours ago

              hard disk drives do still exist, and are useful for some stuff. mostly they’re cheaper. I think better for stuff you write to often?

              SSD’s can overheat. but, again, there are usually sensors to throttle them when you’re in danger of this, and this idiot probably disabled those. because safety is for cucks i guess.

            • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              21 hours ago

              not personally, i may have seen a video or two of it happening, but it’s hard to tell whether the head is dragging against the platter, or it’s the bearing, either one of those makes horrendous noise.

              If you’re worried about it happening on a drive you own, you should copy that data somewhere else as a backup, ideally sooner rather than later. If you’re curious about the health of the drive you do stuff like SMART tests as well.

              Yeah, most drives are solid state now, unless you’re buying hdds for archival purposes, still cheaper and denser in most cases. It’s a low probability failure, until the drive meets EOL, in which case it’s a mechanical wear part, either the motor or the bearing fails. One of them will fail first, probably the bearing.

              The bearing failing would likely result in the HDD overheating as a result. Assuming the platter still spins, but that’s the only scenario i can think of where that would happen, unless you dump a very specific amount of continuous current into the read arm coils. That might also cause it, but it’s not likely at all.

              An ssd “overheating” is more likely, but it shouldn’t cause too many issues, maybe premature degradation over long term use, and slowing of read/write speeds, or in some cases, an improvement, but other than that it should be business as normal. You would have to hit it with like a heat gun, to get a hardware failure or something like that.

              • Professorozone@lemmy.world
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                20 hours ago

                I’m not actually worried about my drives. In fact that was kind of the point. I was kidding around because this excuse that the hard drive overheated sounds a little like a car running out of blinker fluid.

            • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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              21 hours ago

              I had it happen to a random hard drive I bought, old bastard found in a bin at a local thrift store. Anyways had a big dent in it and while it started up, even booting into windows XP it cooked itself made a screeching noise and was hot to the touch. Don’t think I need to explain that the big dent was probably the source of the overheating, anyways had to use an oven mitt to relocate it to a metal bucket of water where it boiled for a minute.

                • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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                  20 hours ago

                  Sure if they physically damaged the hard drive, though at that point the failure and the code were largely unrelated. Though if they were using a computer with an SSD only I would have no clue. Assuming they aren’t lying id have to look at the computer physically, perhaps even pry it open to see if there’s any noticable damage.

                  There’s also the possibility that they are just stupid and overheated their CPU by having too many apps open. Then they blamed their hard drive overheating because they are stupid.