Solved! How does increasing hard disk size and closing the lid affect heat?

[rafedonson]

I've got a laptop with a docking station, a bit of a bargain since it's a Probook G1 which has most of the components easily accessible. However, I've got two questions relating to heat:

1) If I use it in the docking station, with the lid closed, is this okay? I'm planning on using it closed most of the time.

2) I've been using it open up till now but when I changed from the single platter 7200rpm 320gb drive to a 5400rpm 1TB hard drive, with at least three platters, the fan seemed to kick in more. Is this just my imagination, or will it get warmer with bigger size hard disk? Googleing the latter seems to give a few contrary answers.

 

[dudeman509]

#2 depends on the drive really. The HDD (well, SSD) isn't near the fan in my HP. I had Seagate laptop drives that made a crap ton of heat, and failed constantly in a Dell I had that didn't have good HDD ventilation.

We use HP Probooks at work (450 G2 and 840 G3), and they sit in the docking stations 95% of the time with the lids closed.

Mine's a 450 G2 with an i7-4800MQ, which makes all kinds of heat under even one-two core loads. With thermal paste re-applied, it does just fine keeping itself cool under heavy load. I have another ProBook at home with a 3630QM and dedicated graphics at home that cools even better. For the most part, they implemented pretty good cooling solutions on the ProBooks.

 

[smashjohn]

1) Yes. Laptops shed most of the heat through vents in the side & bottom of the case. Also, with the device closed, your laptop screen is off and therefore not producing any heat.

2) Chances are good that a 5400rpm drive uses less power than a 7200rpm drive. In either case the heat generated between these two drives is probably only nominally different (0.7W-1.0W).

 

[jsmithepa]

U don't have to guess, can download one of many apps that will read temp from cpu, chipset, hd, fan rpm etc.

As far as the lid, depends on the laptop. Run a test both open and close and monitor temp see if any appreciable difference.

 

[rafedonson]

Thanks - I've not tried swapping hard disk again yet, but I've downloaded an app and run 3DMark. I don't plan on actually using it for anything remotely GPU taxing, but it recorded 75 degrees CPU package both with and without the lid open.