Upgrading Hard Drive - Warranty and Overheating Issues

+ excellent

+ Ralph

Well, I have had the personal experience of drives overheating and dying in a laptop and a desktop. Three drives in each. So there is definitely more than just a possibility. And a higher RPM drive is certainly likely to produce more heat due to the friction of the bearings. Ditto for a larger capacity drive. For the record, Apple only offers a 5400 RPM 500GB drive as an upgrade for the 13" Macbook Pro. They offer a 500GB 7200 RPM drive only for the larger 15" and 17". There has to be a reason for these limitations I think. Another thing, high end PC cases meant for high performance CPUs, GPUs, and high-speed hard drives usually have separate fans in the drive bays. Heat is definitely a problem, especially in a tight space like a laptop. So the question is, how much of a problem is it if you exceed Apple's own limitations? There must be people on this forum with first-hand experience with installing higher spec drives in their Macbooks. Come on.

Wow - I'm amazed you've had three drives die on you that way. I don't ask to be rude, I honestly am wanting to learn more - but how would the storage capacity of a hard drive affect its heat output?

I've run a relatively high end gaming desktop for the last 5 years that I've kept update with new parts, and while I've experienced heat issues, they were always on my GPU or CPU (and usually from dust buildup clogging the fans). I did manage to make a few capacitors on my graphics card explode one time from too much heat buildup. :P

I attribute the overheating problem to poor case design. Both units were ordered by my wife who knows nothing about PCs. A Dell desktop and an HP "professional" laptop. Both had tiny cases with one wholly inadequate fan for the entire system. Sure most of the heat came from the CPU/GPU and it fried the drives, but if the drives had had fans blowing on them this probably wouldn't have happened. Case in point, after replacing the second HD on the Dell, which burned out because Windows decided to bring it out of standby when we were away one day, I simply placed the new HD OUTSIDE the case with a massive fan blowing on it. In the case the HD would easily reach 45 degrees C! Now it barely reaches 30 degrees C. So a fan on the HD really does matter. But I'm kind of surprised that you are running a high end gaming box and haven't run into this very problem. Does your case have an isolated drive bay with fan(s) blowing on the drives?