Temperature of a 7200rpm laptop hard drive

[chip!]

ok, so i recently upgraded my 5400rpm drive to a 7200rpm and I am enjoying the speed increase however I've noticed that the drive is overheating to unsafe levels.. 50C+ (or 130-140F)..  which my 5400 never did. anyone ever use one of those laptop coolmats? i'm wondering if i should give that a try before i either get a different brand (currently Hitachi Travelstar, supposed to be good).. or if all else fails, going to put back in the 5400 i guess ..   Vista is very very snappy now with the 7200 though.

[texasboy]

ok, so i recently upgraded my 5400rpm drive to a 7200rpm and I am enjoying the speed increase however I've noticed that the drive is overheating to unsafe levels.. 50C+ (or 130-140F)..  which my 5400 never did. anyone ever use one of those laptop coolmats? i'm wondering if i should give that a try before i either get a different brand (currently Hitachi Travelstar, supposed to be good).. or if all else fails, going to put back in the 5400 i guess ..   Vista is very very snappy now with the 7200 though.

Wouldnt worry too much Chip.Most modern laptops at 7200rpm run to 55-60C under normal load. It is not uncommon to reach 80-90C when playing games. However most of them will throttle back above thIs and give you a warning at say 92-95C.
Hitachi/Dell etc. If its an older laptop upgraded then I would start worrying as the cooling system may not support much above say 70-80C.
cheers
cheers

[Quantum]

50C+ is fine for a hard drive.

In fact a survey Google on 1000s of its hard drives that they have had around for 5 years, it showed some off results, including the fact that hard drives which operated at a higher temperature through their life cycle, rather than kept cool, tended to last longer.

[chip!]

does 50C+ include running at 60C-65C under normal conditions? and by normal conditions, I mean only listening to music, web browsing, instant messaging, and maybe having Visual Studio open for development. now that i've had this harddrive in for a little bit longer, i've been able to monitor it better and more often than not, my hdd is running 60C+...   yet I dont think its ever peaked over 65C..  once it gets to about 64C, I start to notice performance issues and I start closing programs..

I guess since I've never had a laptop harddrive get this hot, I dont know how far I can push it..  the problem is that I LOVE the performance increase I have with the 7200 over the 5400 and I really dont want to go back..  I hate having to wait for lag when copying files or doing anything that I know is harddrive related (and in Vista, the disk speed improvement for the virtual RAM is outstanding).. but if these temps truly are normal, I guess I can live with it. I think my only other option would be to buy another brands SATA 7200 (only other one on Newegg is seagate) and compare the temp differences..

[Quantum]

Yeah, hard drives just get that hot, it's one of those things.

Laptops are more prone to hotter hard drives, I keep my hard drives in my CPU very well aired, there's a large fan placed directly in line with them, so mine tend not to go higher than 50 - 55. So 60 - 65 sounds about right for an environment which is difficult to air out.