IBM Hard Drive Temp Utility

A handy little utility that measures hard drive temps — Scott Halloran

ED Note: Scott sent this email:

Tweaktown has a good article on IBM GXP cooling. It mentions several times that IBM should state cooling requirements for
these drives. They do, but in a subtle way.

I have a 40GB 60GXP. When I first installed it, I had
it sitting outside the case, on a paperback book.
Ambient temp was about 24C. IBM’s website supplies a
number of drive utilities, one of them being IBM Feature Tool.

One feature of the IBM Feature Tool is a drive temperature
measurement combined with stress test.

Once you
select this, you are told that the max drive temp
should be 60C. I ran it until the temp leveled out at
57C.
I was shocked! The drive was still on the
paperback, which was starting to smell. The unit was
almost too hot too touch, the hottest part being the
circuit board.

I immediately ran off to the store and got a cheap
cooler that blows on the underside of the drive. I
ran the test again, this time with the drive installed
in my not-so-cool 286 case – I got 43C.

I checked the datasheet
HERE
and it talks about ambient temp, but not drive temp.

I would recommend this to anyone using these drives.
And yes, IBM could be more open about these issues and
the tools they have available to address them.

If you try this, drop me a line and tell me what drives this features works, or does not work, on.

Scott Halloran

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