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.
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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
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 |
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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? 
24 Comments
/dev/sda: WDC WD2500KS-00MJB0 : 27°C
Nice and cold.
There is a neat Gnome applet for this which is called Computer Temperature Monitor.
It can monitor both your CPU and HDD temperature and has adopted the same look as the CPU frequency scaling monitor applet. However, it does not work anymore in Feisty.
Furthermore, you can access the SMART information directly with the smartmon tools. Simply install the package smartmontools (available in main). Then type the command:
sudo smartctl -A /dev/hdaThere should be a line for the temperature, and you should look at the raw value column.
For Feisty, ATA disk are handle like SATA, so now the device are called /dev/sda, thus the command needs to be tweaked to tell smartctl that it is still ATA:
sudo smartctl -A -d ata /dev/sda1610 <ZeppleBot> Battery at 31.94%; on mains; CPU at 59°C; HDD at 69°C.Yeeeah…like I said, horrible cooling. This is what shifting seven-odd gig of data off of the drive did.
* LionsPhil sets PISG updating the stats for #ecs<LionsPhil> zb acpi<ZeppleBot> Battery at 99.90%; on mains; CPU at 72°C; HDD at 61°C; too damn hot in here.(ZeppleBot uses acpitool and hddtemp to get those values.) It doesn’t help that the aircon in our shiny new building has, er, never worked:
<LionsPhil> zb temp<ZeppleBot> Now: 28.5°C. Record temperatures: low: 23.9°C, 8:10, Fri 9 Feb 2007; high: 29.9°C, 13:42, Mon 16 Apr 2007.…but it’ll hit those kind of temperatures normally. IBM’s plastic-series ThinkPads have horrible cooling: the fans kick in when the CPU goes over sixty, and an anemic little draft cools a tiny copper heatsink in the far left corner, connected by heat pipes to the adjacent CPU. The GPU, RAM, and HDD are all also down the left hand side, but are completely uncooled. This results in burning your left palm. My old iSeries (actually rebranded Acers, apparently) had similar problems.
I don’t beat any of you on highest or lowest temperature, but I do beat you on number of data points. I set a cron job to record my hard drive temperature every five minutes just over a year ago and then promptly forgot about it. A bit of rrd trickery gives this graph:
http://atchoo.org/images/hdatemp.png
Cheers,
Roger
This old Thinkpad R30 I’m on now overheats if I don’t peg the CPU at 70% when it’s doing CPU-intensive tasks (playing DVDs, compiling lots of code) – I’ve had mid to high 70s before the machine shuts off (while I was working this out!). Needless to say, the HDD in the same unit picks up some of this heat and it’s sat in the mid 60s or so. Before I worked out the SpeedStep trick, the only way to supplement the struggling fan was to point a pedestal fan at it – making the convenience of watching DVDs less convenient! Thankfully the CPU and HDD are currently 47 and 43 degrees, respectively.
It would appear my Dell Latitude laptop needs to kick those fans in a little earlier!
delta@delta:~$ sudo hddtemp /dev/hda
/dev/hda: HITACHI_DK23EA-20: 60°C
The fans are nowhere near the disk. They only seem to cool the CPU and GPU.
No.
Have a nice day.
benden:~# hddtemp /dev/hda
/dev/hda: WDC WD800JB-00FMA0: 36°C
landing:/home/jayell# hddtemp /dev/sd[abc]
/dev/sda: IBM DDRS-39130: drive supported, but it doesn’t have a temperature sensor.
/dev/sdb: IBM DDRS-39130: drive supported, but it doesn’t have a temperature sensor.
/dev/sdc: IBM DDRS-39130: drive supported, but it doesn’t have a temperature sensor.
both systems on 24/7
You can add an applet to your GNOME panel called “GNOME Sensors Applet” which has a hddtemp plugin (as well as libsensors) the package is called: sensors-applet
This is perhaps what you are looking for: Computer Temperature Monitor, it works under Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) and Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft).
If you are running Feisty Fawn, I have updated the package to work with it, I have send it to the maintainer, hopefully it will be available soon on his project site.
I am using Ubuntu linux and I have hddtemp installed I’m just wondering if I can get conky to display it on my desktop.
Ive got the hdd running at 38 degrees, but after I installed sensors-applet I found the CPU was running at 52 degrees! That cant be good……
Thanks for the blog post that got me playing around with temperatures…………….
PC running all day. CPU does not get hot but the drive is at 51°C.
I have had drives work under similar conditions for years.
You might want to look into lm_sensors, but I can’t you offer much more than that because it’s a long time since I’ve looked into it.
Cheers,
Roger
Thanks for the tip, is there a similar tool to measure the CPU temp? My laptop often crashes because of the CPU overheating…
What distribution of Linux you are running as to how you install hddtemp. What are you using?
I’m relatively new to linux and I was wondering if there was a way to get my conky setup to display hddtemp.
Make sure the hddtemp is setup in daemon mode (a nmap, telnet, or netcat should show port 7634, the default hddtemp port, is giving output), and use the hddtemp variable in conky. Example: ${hddtemp /dev/sda}. However, this’ll only work if the drives have an entry in that database. You can always add one if you know which field is the temperature in a “hddtemp -D /dev/foo” output.
I can beat the record with 59 degrees:
cjo20@comp1:~$ sudo hddtemp /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1: WDC WD1600JS-75NCB3 : 59°C
encompass@essence:~$ sudo hddtemp /dev/sda
/dev/sda: FUJITSU MHV2100BH PL: 37°C
encompass@essence:~$
and my little laptop that now runs as a server is…
lappy@lappy:~$ sudo hddtemp /dev/hda
/dev/hda: HITACHI_DK23CA-10: 56°C
lappy@lappy:~$
That one is a little funkier… I don’t think it is accurate at all.
…does not work together.
Read the smartctl(8) man page.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/18/massive-google-hard-drive-survey-turns-up-very-interesting-thing/“
“…and there is less correlation between drive temperature and failure rates than might have been expected, and drives that are cooled excessively actually fail more often than those running a little hot.â€