HDD burning up?

[Chiyawa]

Hi,

 

Recently I noticed my external hard disk drive begin to heat up to a point that it thermal throttled. Is this a sign that the drive is about to die?

 

Here are the details of the drive:

WD Elements (https://shop.westerndigital.com/en-ap/products/portable-drives/wd-elements-portable-usb-3-0-hdd#WDBU6Y0020BBK-WESN). It's a 2TB drive. I bought it at year 2013. I rarely used it, only to transfer large video files or large files from PC to PC. The drive usually kept empty and undergo defragmentation once every month. When in use, it is places on a table and securely and are not move during reading and writing operation.

 

Just last week, when I transfer around 400GB worth of data into it, the transfer speed is quite good (can get close to 170MB/s) but then it drop to 90MB/s after 15 minutes or so. When I move my hand near to it (not touching it, but in very close distant of 5mm away), I can feel the warm air surrounding it. I check with Crystal Disk Info and it reported that the disk temperature is 56 degrees C. I then put a small USB fan and blow the air towards the HDD and the temperature went down a bit and the speed return to 160MB/s. By the way, the room temperature at that time is about 34C. This didn't happened until this year, when I noticed that transferring large file takes longer than usual.

 

So far when I checked the disk using chkdsk, there are no errors. SMART health report is good. It's just that the disk is very warm and can burn your finger if you touch it while transferring a very large file. So far it began to thermal throttled after 20 minutes of transferring file, which it will began to throttle down its speed.

 

I know the HDD can get warm while in operation, but to get this hot (over 50C), this is my first time encountering this situation.

 

Regards,

Chiyawa

[Poet129]

37 minutes ago, Chiyawa said:

Hi,

 

Recently I noticed my external hard disk drive begin to heat up to a point that it thermal throttled. Is this a sign that the drive is about to die?

 

--snip--

 

I know the HDD can get warm while in operation, but to get this hot (over 50C), this is my first time encountering this situation.

 

Regards,

Chiyawa

I'm not an expert however this is relatively normal in my experience. I would expect and have experienced drives slowing down a bit after use. This seems like that. However I can't stress enough that you should always have a backup of anything important. If SMART is saying that everything is good then it likely is.

[Chiyawa]

4 minutes ago, Poet129 said:

I'm not an expert however this is relatively normal in my experience. I would expect and have experienced drives slowing down a bit after use. This seems like that. However I can't stress enough that you should always have a backup of anything important. If SMART is saying that everything is good then it likely is.

It's okay as this drive only serves as transporting large data to and from devices (USB 3.0 transferring rate is higher than gigabit ethernet).

 

I see. Thanks for your input. I'll see if there's other way to cool off the external HDD when using it.