In places like where I live (Malaysia), we are usually lucky enough to stay in cool & cozy office space. But one thing we have always failed to notice, is how temperature can shoot high while we’re using our computers at home or at places without air-conditioning. Yes, besides electric surge and shock, heat can cause serious damage to the hardware, especially the harddisk. From my limited experience, a harddisk that frequently goes beyond 53° celcius is bound to fail in less than a year!

For people like me, using the o-so-cheap-and-popular Dell notebook, you can download a free utility called i8kfan. What I usually do is to turn on the harddrive temperature sensor and display it on the system tray, along-side the CPU temperature.

Alternatively, you may want to use another free software which provides a nice GUI, and takes up just a little bit more RAM (9K, as compared to i8kfan’s 4K). Enter Active@ Harddisk Monitor.

Not only does it provide a system tray temperature display, it also shows the harddisk SMART info, the de-facto standard for harddisk health monitoring (although I have never been able to fully understand what all those numbers means exactly).

Well fine, now that we know the temperature of the harddrive, and if it’s too high, what do we do ? Obviously you could get yourself an air-conditioning system. Or, just get your PC better cooling; and for laptops, get yourself one of those laptop cooling pad, like this:

 

, or this:

Doesn’t really matters which one, as long as there’s wind blowing below your laptop, and better still get your table/standing fan to blow at you and the laptop (that’s what you usually does anyway). This definitely lower the harddisk’s temperature by may be 3° or 4° celcius, and that’s good enough! May your harddrive lives long and prosper!