how to monitor hdd temprature

[Vincent Trouilliez]

> In the Ubuntu's Universe package repository, there's the package
> "hddtemp".
> After installing it, you can check the HDD temperature using something
> like:
>   # sudo hddtemp /dev/hda


Thanks, simple and effective :-)

Both of my hard drives have exactly the same temperature, 52°C.
Granted, that doesn't tell much... what is the recommended operating
temperature for drives to be reliable in the long term ?

Both drives are technically similar, old school IDE 40G IDE 7200rpm
drives. Both are set to spin constantly (I disabled stand by delay with
hdparm voluntarily).

I hope 52 degrees is okay, because if these drives run too hot, I guess
I can't do much about it, in that using more modern drives (faster, 10K
rpm or more...SCSI), will only make things worse I assume.
Once, at work, a quality engineer from Maxtor told me to run away from
fast SCSI drives in desktop computers (ie, small/tight case, no adequate
cooling), because they end up running so hot that the electronics (which
is cheaply designed on consumer drives, to make things even worse),
doesn't take long before failing one way or another.

So, please tell me that 52 degrees is well within the safe temp range,
just so I can sleep on both ears tonight...

The only aggravating factor I can see in my set up, is that both drives
are actually on top of each other. I would have liked to leave at least
an empty bay/slot between them, but the case won't allow for that sadly,
it's not very well designed in this respect.


--
Vince, not overly worried, but doesn't like to navigate in the dark
either...