High temp? Better cooling or new drive?

[flatout01]

I have a 2.5 yr old SD-H400 and was about to replace my drive because of freezing and stuck at "powering up" issues. I have a post on the upgrade forum already.

I got home and wanted to try pause and code 58 once more. It ran for about half an hour, I watched a short show (all working fine) and checked temp occasionally until it froze up again.

I saw a temp as high as 53 (temp climbed each time I looked at it), it said "normal" but I have seen here that it shouldn't run higher than 50, and better to be cooler than that. Also, the longer it is off the longer it runs and the better chance it has of booting up - which tells me it is a temp-related/aggravated issue.

Is the temp the drive or a chip or what?

My fan is running, although I don't know if the flow (rpm) is normal. I took off the cover and the HD is a little warm, but certainly not hot at all. There are some board-mounted heat sinks under the HD and they are pretty warm.

I was thinking about bringing a fan in from work and blowing on things and seeing if it runs longer.

Is this worthwhile or is it just shot?

How hard does the fan blow for someone that has a well-working one (like how much does it blow a piece of paper or something)?

I'm looking at getting a 5 yr warranty Seagate drive from an Ebay Tivo-upgrade store.

Is temp what kills these drives or what?

[funtoupgrade]

Heat is a known detriment to hard drive life, but the main reason for failure is the number of reads/writes and since a TiVo drive is working 100% of the time it is plugged in it is much more apt to fail quicker than in a computer that is used occasionally.

The fan does not blow with much force and is designed to quietly move warm air out of the unit. You can't hurt anything by trying to add more or different cooling. Whether that will solve your problem or not is unclear.