New HDD too hot to handle?

born2bwild

I put a new 1 Tb drive and windows 7 professional onto my vaio. It had been running windows home and a 320G HDD.
The machine has started cutting out - literally dying - I can boot it back up after a few minutes down.
I cleaned out the fan but I'm wondering - is the new HDD causing it to overheat? Is the overheating leading to the power dying???

dilallio

I doubt very much that it's the HDD. It doesn't generate heat.

Yes - overheating will cause the machine to power off.

When you cleaned the fan, did you remove it or remove the heatsink (long piece of metal which conducts heat from the processor / graphics card to the fan) attached to the fan?
Check that the fan assembly is properly in place - if you unscrewed a series of screws to remove the heatsink, they should be screwed back in a particular order - they may be numbered. If they are not numbered, screw them back similar to replacing the nuts on a car wheel - the second screw should be opposite the first.
Check also that the cable connecting the fan to the motherboard is correctly attached and there is no other cable physically blocking the fan from rotating.

born2bwild

No I didn't clean the heatsink - I blew like a 10 dollah ho into the fan. Cue a dirty cloud of grey dust spewing out - I don't think that that was the problem, though....

I didn't mean that the hard drive would generate heat itself - rather that it and the new OS might be giving the CPU/RAM more work than it can handle and cause the CPU to get too hot.

At any rate I have this 'speedfan' programme running constantly to keep an eye on temperature.

Blowing into a laptop is not a good idea, your breath contains moisture. That's what canned air is for.

Anyway your problem does sound heat related but it is unlikely to be caused by the HDD.

hearny

Is the new hard drive the same height as the old one, going from a 9.5mm drive to a 12.5mm drive may block some airflow and as cause the overheating.

Install Speccy on the macgine to get temperature readings from HDD / CPU.
http://www.piriform.com/speccy

Overheating is obviously bad for the laptop so the quicker you sort it the better.

Freddy Smelly

you could try opening up the laptop... removing the cpu & gpu heatsinks and fans (NEVER BLOW ON A FAN WHILE IT IS PLUGGED INTO THE MOTHERBOARD... you basically turn the fan into a dynamo and can damage the motherboard).... cleaning them both out then (important) carefully clean the surfaces of the cpu and gpu with TIM Fluid (available in pcword) and (this is extremely important) apply a fresh even layer of thermal paste (€10 for a tube in pcworld) on the surfaces of the cpu and gpu then carefully reattach the heatsinks and fans.

this will greatly help reduce the temps on both the cpu and gpu.

NOTE: if your laptop is under warranty you may void it... read your terms & conditions before opening the laptop.

maki

Freddy Smelly wrote: »

(NEVER BLOW ON A FAN WHILE IT IS PLUGGED INTO THE MOTHERBOARD... you basically turn the fan into a dynamo and can damage the motherboard)

This is really nothing to worry about. If you think about it, every time you turn off your computer the fans continue to spin momentarily, which does indeed induce a current. This is on top of the fact that back-EMF is constantly being generated while the fan is in operation. It's well known that this happens and engineers will always incorporate protection against it, usually in the form of a transistor hiding behind a diode.

No mains power = transistor off = no flow of current.

Freddy Smelly

maki wrote: »

This is really nothing to worry about. If you think about it, every time you turn off your computer the fans continue to spin momentarily, which does indeed induce a current. This is on top of the fact that back-EMF is constantly being generated while the fan is in operation. It's well known that this happens and engineers will always incorporate protection against it, usually in the form of a transistor hiding behind a diode.

No mains power = transistor off = no flow of current.

that maybe true but blowing on a fan makes it spin much faster than the fan was designed to spin at. so to error on the side of caution i never blow on a fan while it's plugged in. not to mention when you blow into a fan your also blowing in particles of saliva which is not ph neutral in adults its actually slightly acidic @ avg of 6.5ph and can cause slight corrosion on sensitive parts.

ED E

Freddy Smelly wrote: »

that maybe true but blowing on a fan makes it spin much faster than the fan was designed to spin at. so to error on the side of caution i never blow on a fan while it's plugged in. not to mention when you blow into a fan your also blowing in particles of saliva which is not ph neutral in adults its actually slightly acidic @ avg of 6.5ph and can cause slight corrosion on sensitive parts.

Lol no.

Blowing on a fan isnt ever nearly as fast as it runs at 12v. Not a hope.

I've even run fans by blowing on them with an air compressor and never had an issue. This stuff is urban myth or very dated.

BostonB

born2bwild wrote: »

No I didn't clean the heatsink - I blew like a 10 dollah ho into the fan. Cue a dirty cloud of grey dust spewing out - I don't think that that was the problem, though......

A big cloud of dust would disagree with you....