Am I Hot Or Not

We have just had quite a warm weekend here in the UK. As temperatures rise, often so does the likelyhood of computer failure. In my experience this happens more in the home or small office where air conditioning isn’t quite so prevalent (in the UK).

One component that doesn’t like high tempreatures is the hard disk. Enter hddtemp, a great little package to tell you how hot your disks are. It’s been around a while, but many people don’t know about it. I found myself installing it on everything and pasting in IRC, then a few others starting doing the same.

It can be run on the command line to get the current temperature, or can be used as a daemon which can provide information to other clients such as gkrellm.

It works well, giving reasonable values. My desktop:- alan@wopr:~$ sudo hddtemp /dev/sd[ab] Password: /dev/sda: Maxtor 6V250F0 : 43°C /dev/sdb: Maxtor 6V250F0 : 43°C My laptop:- alan@hactar:~$ sudo hddtemp /dev/sda /dev/sda: Hitachi HTS541060G9AT00 : 40°C Other times it can be a bit scary:- 12:24:51 <@darksatanic> hrm@vlad:~ $ sudo hddtemp /dev/sd[abcd] 12:24:51 <@darksatanic> /dev/sda: ST3120026AS: 58°C 12:24:51 <@darksatanic> /dev/sdb: SAMSUNG SP2004C: 52°C 12:24:51 <@darksatanic> /dev/sdc: ST380013AS: 52°C 12:24:53 <@darksatanic> /dev/sdd: ST380013AS: 55°C ..possibly inaccurate.. alan@happy:~$ sudo hddtemp /dev/sd[ab] /dev/sda: ST3250824AS: 27°C /dev/sdb: ST3250824AS: 27°C 12:36:09 <@bob-lad> hddtemp /dev/sda /dev/hdc /dev/hdd 12:36:09 <@bob-lad> /dev/sda: WDC WD2500KS-00MJB0: 43°C 12:36:09 <@bob-lad> /dev/hdc: ST340014A: 48°C 12:36:09 <@bob-lad> /dev/hdd: Maxtor 4D040H2: 0°C

Sometimes it doesn’t work:-

alan@box:~$ sudo hddtemp /dev/hda
WARNING: Drive /dev/hda doesn't seem to have a temperature sensor.
WARNING: This doesn't mean it hasn't got one.
WARNING: If you are sure it has one, please contact me (hddtemp@guzu.net).
WARNING: See --help, --debug and --drivebase options.
/dev/hda: Maxtor 90645D3:  no sensor

(that’s quite an old Dell desktop, so I am not surprised).

alan@wopr:~$ sudo hddtemp  /dev/sdg
/dev/sdg: ST3750640A: S.M.A.R.T. not available

(that’s a USB connected hard disk on my desktop. Possibly the SMART data doesn’t go over the USB/SCSI interface as it does with local IDE/SCSI/SATA disks?)

Hugo has the record so far for the hottest functioning drive at 58°C.

So, are you hot or not?