How Hot Can An External Hard Drive Get Before Reaching The Danger Zone?

I was copying some large files to my computer from my Seagate external drive and Hard Disk Sentinel told me that the drive got up to 52 degrees (I assume centigrade). The number was green as far as 49 and then when it got to 50, it turned yellow.

 

You would have to look at the specs of the specific drive. They are all different. Though it seems thermal specs may not be listed. A quick look at a couple Seagate external drives does not show temperature tolerances. A quick look at WD external drives does not either - though they do show a WD utility that reports on the drive's temperature status. Perhaps a similar utility came with your Seagate.

That said, one of the problems with external drives is they are enclosed in a small case. Some cases have fans, others don't. But those with fans tend to be tiny fans that cannot move a lot of cool air - at least not without a lot of fan noise which people don't like.

Some metal enclosure cases act as heat sinks but if there is no or little ventilation around the enclosure, that does not help much.

However, hard drives are pretty robust devices and looking at a few "internal" WD and Seagate drives, I am seeing operating temperature ranges of 0 to 60°C. So your 50°C is fine.

I would make sure you have lots of ventilation around your drive when doing large file transfers for extended periods of time.

 

Great, thanks. It's a weird drive, this one. No visible vents of any kind that I can see. It just seems to be a completely enclosed case. So I'll just try and keep it as cool as I can.

 

Sounds like a plan!