New WD My Book 8TB helium running at hot temperature

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

Hi

I received a few new drives today and one of them was an 8TB My Book. I’m running an extended SMART test on all of them, but this one is louder than any other drive I’ve had (I read on the net that this is normal for a helium drive, I’ve never had a helium drive before), and it’s also running very hot, 42-45C. For comparison, all my other drives are at 27-30C (internal or external, running SMART test or idling), and the room temperature is 17C.

Is it normal that it runs so hot? Should I RMA it? I’m worried about this, as in the summer room temperature goes up to 30-32C and my healthy drives will run at 35-40C, so I can only imagine how hot this one will be.

I can confirm that the temp. is real, as even the enclosure feels a lot warmer than my other My Books (all of smaller capacity, so not helium).

2

Hi Rm52,

Drives are mechanically designed in a way that it will get little hot while performing read write operations. However, it should be up to a limit. If you feel it is getting more hotter then expected, perform drive tests using WD Drive Utilities.

https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=10408