Speccy says my laptop hard drive is 40c/105f right now after a bunch of reboots and working it a bit harder than norm.

I haven't used one yet but do see forums where people say the SSD drive runs hotter than their old spinning hard drives did. This seems to concern them... But think they are hotter is just because its a different kind of dohicky that will be naturally hotter running than a cool hard drive.

If your hard drive is blinking a light seemingly too much,, maybe you have a need for adding more memory to stop or lessen swap file use. Also if you always leave the battery in place you might want to disable from device manager at the hard drive properties, policy, Windows write cache buffer flushing. Takes that one second hard drive blink away.

You can further cool it down adding a RamDisk for your internet temporary file cache. If you want to be a little geeky.

Here is a link that might be useful: http://www.piriform.com/speccy

I have not heard of HDD running that hot that you can feel the heat from the outside of the NB. For all the NBs here in office, it's the CPU that is generating the heat.

Maybe I am missing something here. I feel the heat through my laptop, I thought that was normal. I assuming the HP notebook is a laptop. HP has even changed the name of their lap tops to notebooks because of people getting burned from the heat. They decided calling a laptop was a bad idea and changed it to notebook.

It is normal all Laptops run warm and you can feel the heat from them, the G60 series from HP has always had more of an issue with heat, related to maybe design issues...

Why The HP G60 / G62 Overheats?

#1 Plugged Up Internal Heatsink Exhaust

#2 HPs MAJOR Cooling Defect / Poor Heat Transfer

#3 Small Restricted Bottom Intake Vent

http://augustapcrepair.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/hp-g60-laptop-another-overheat-problem/

Most laptops give off a lot of heat - especially Macbooks. Maybe it's because they have less airflow than desktops? The heat comes from most everything inside - the circuitry and processor, a charging battery, a hard drive, all contribute a share.

It's true that the useful life of electronic components is shortened when exposed to higher temperatures. (Ever been in a server room, it's always very cold). No sense in replacing a drive before it fails, just be sure to have important stuff backed up. Most laptop drives hold up ok to the heat, impacts and jolts seem to be more of an occupational risk for them.

SSDs are used in situations where either an application, or the user (!), requires faster response time than from a spinning drive. I think it would be an expensive and likely pointless effort to use one simply to try to reduce heat.

We use vista OS. I am considering swapping out the drive and putting on winxp as an experiment to see if it runs any cooler/calmer. I check the task manager and it says basically no memory is available. I have read that this is a perceived function of how vista runs and is not the same as winxp.

Joe you might want to ensure that XP drivers are available for the particular model of computer that you have.

You are not seriously considering buying XP to do this experiment are you?

Have you tried Speccy as Mikie suggested above? It is a neat little program that gives you a wealth of information. Try it, you can always remove it if the program does not live up to your expectations. but at least it will give you hard drive temps read out.

i have a winxp disc handy. used or refurb drives are almost free.

I was considering buying a ssd until I read about their high failure rate. BTW I have a HP G62. It has four rubber knobs on the bottom. The one next to the exhaust port literally started melting.

Some cpu's, maybe all of them ... you can look in power management and set the minimum and maximum speeds for the CPU. Mine are set 5% minimum 100% max.. they speed up and slow down on demand extremely fast..... you can lower the max to maybe 95% see if that helps cool it down a bit. It should greatly cool the cpu.

If you know you have an Intel chipset, or even if you don't know.. you can visit support intel.com and have it scan for updated/current intel drivers. They've greatly improved things in past couple months,, for all their components,,, maybe in anticipation of Win8 upgrades and the demands microsoft has placed on energy efficiency lately.

Speedy SSD drives.. wow, some are very nice, but pricey. My laptop came with 5400rpm sata2 but is sata3 capable.. makes for an expensive wish.
Newer versions of SSHD's boots and starts up your most used favorite programs nearly the same SSD fast and still isn't as reliable as standard hd. and they too run hotter.