“I’m concerned about the heating of external drives because many of these little enclosures provide no active air flow across the drive.”, opines Steve Gibson.
And in the field of hard disk maintenance, he would have to be the expert. SpinRite is the result of his knowledge in the field.
My Seagate FreeAgent Classic drive is an example of this heating issue.
The case was getting far too hot for my comfort, so I drilled holes in it.
But I haven’t done this for my other two external drives, as they run cooler.
“Why do they?”, you ask.
Two likely reasons:
- The drives turn themselves off when not being used. This is known as an Idle Sleep. All three of my external drives do that.
- I suspect the drives have heat detection built-in, and they slow themselves down as they get hotter.
This would explain why my WD Passport drive slows down during heavy prolonged use.
2. isn’t so bad. But 1., the drive shutting itself down, can play havoc with instant-on applications. Such as satellite TV recording. The work-around is to find drives which don’t shutdown, such as the LaCie range of external drives.
