Overheating (As in 2 minutes) Drive Question

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BugMonkey

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I know this is an older drive - a Maxtor MaxLine Plus II 250 GB running HIGH temperature - but I'm gonna try posting a question here about it anyway. I've recently acquired an HP Media Center PC m1270 n, Intel P4 530 on an ASUS Puffer w/ 1gb of RAM (ca. 2005). I started getting the BSOD followed by a boot up cycle that never completed, stuck in a cycle of attempted reboot. To try to regain some data and usage, I've been using SpinRite 6 to keep as much data from being corrupted as possible. I was also thinking about overclocking, so I installed SpeedFan to get an idea of temps. (I hadn't yet gotten to learn enough about SpeedFan and the tech it manages to change default settings in SpeedFan, however, so I never overclocked.) I don't remember it running crazy temps, but I'm pretty new to monitoring systems in this fashion so I never knew what was high when I was looking at them.

That's all to say that SpeedRite is telling me I'm running real hot on the drive and it climbs from around 38C to 55C in 10 minutes of it's diagnostic/repair work. However, the "touch test" doesn't seem to reveal anything just over room temperature. It's not real hot to the touch by any stretch of my index fingers ability to withstand. By the way, I've got the sides off the machine, drive slid part way out of case, and a window fan pointed at the HDD while I'm running it. One morning it got to 60C in less than 10 minutes after sitting cold all night. A HDD cooler might work but won't address a more significant issue; it is now reaching dangerous temps within 2 minutes of booting up and running SpinRite6. Ironically, it cools down almost as fast as it heats up.

Before the drive finally gave up it's ability to boot up, a couple of times it would click regularly, and gave a series of tones in scale-like progression. In music almost like a 1st, 3rd, 5th and the final 8th to make the octave. I've never heard a computer/drive operate like this.

So: is the temp internal enough not to spread to the casing/housing and it really is that high? Is a drive more prone to overheating once it happens? Is it possible for the HDD temp sensor to go bad or is my awareness of temperature really that bad? Maybe the head is dragging on the surface. I doubt it would be SpinRite's readings; they're taken from the software on board the HDD, correct? I've used SpinRite before on a different laptop drive without any problems.

I'd rather not sink any money that we don't have right now in a new machine, so if anyone has any feedback specific to drive temps or the maxtor, y'all'd be appreciated.

Thanks!
 
I'm not to sure about the temps of your drive but my WD hard drive is running at 25c right now and never gets much hotter.I use spin rite and it wouldn't be causing a problem.
I would just buy another hard drive instead of the whole computer. You can get a decent hard drive for cheep now days. The clicking is a sing of ware and it will give you trouble. Have you ran the number 4 option of spin rite. I'm running that on a 500 gig hard drive right now to try to restore it to health cause it also is clicking and it causes slow downs when ever it dose that. Of course that option is taking 36 hours to complete but I have a spare computer to do that kind of stuff on.
 
I haven't run option 4 yet; I'm not sure the drive could manage the work without overheating. Yesterday I ran SpinRite about 10 times in 2 minute intervals because it would heat up/cool down that fast. Eventually the drive stayed to close to temp to make it worth the effort.

Yeah, I have a small 40gb drive I could put in, and an external drive we use for our data that could maintain the machine. It seems that the drive is just old, and was used hard before we got it (it was primarily a video editing machine of a friend). I'll have to look into getting a bigger drive, but for now may just have to bite the bullet.

Thanks splatoid!
 
Your welcome.
Well spin right just got done running after 36 hrs and didn't find a **** thing wrong with my drive.yeah right Probably not fixable. Good luck getting your stuff back.
 
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