Questions...questions that need answering

[Ymer]

Hello, I have some questions:

1. I've had a motherload of problems with my PC lately, so this morning I opened up the case just to check that everything's firmly in place and stuff. Then I noticed that my two hard drives were pretty hot, while the rest of the stuff was pretty cool. Is this something I should fear, or is it normal?

2. Is there anyone out there who has had this problem, and has managed to solve it: A modem which constantly quits on me, sometimes I must dial up to 4-5 times before "hanging" onto the Net, sometimes it works fine immediately.

3. Is there anyone out there who has had this problem, and has managed to solve it: Having a DVD-ROM drive which doesn't read anything except DVDs when found through PowerDVD/AsusDVD, and a CD-ROM writer/rewriter which slows down the rest of the system incredibly, wether I copy something from it, install a game from it, or burn discs.

[dr_roberts49]

Drives do put out heat. I have an ANTEC drive cooler on my drives. How do you have have your drives (hard drives/CDROMS) connected? I have my 2 hard drives both on IDE1 as master/slave and my DVD and burner on IDE2 as master/slave. I also run all 4 of my drives with DMA activated. Don't know if this helps you much, but since we have the same basic drive setup, I thought a comparison might help. Has this always been a problem on your system? When did your DVD drive start to read DVDs only? How old is it?

Robert

Robert

[Ymer]

My drives started doing this a month or two ago, without me doing anything speficic neither to the hardware nor the OS. I am at a loss, it's really annoying and I just can't find it out.

I do think I have the hard drives on IDE 1, and the disc drives on IDE 2.

[tgxiii]

Try to do these three things to fix problem #3:

1. Re-install the IDE controllers on your motherboard.
2. Update BIOS.
3. Update firmware/drivers for the DVD drives.

I had several problems with my optical drives, and I was able to solve one or the other using one of the methods above. I'm not sure if this will solve the problem, but it's worth a try.

[Dj-Icer]

Its normal having HDD got hotter coz all the programs are running in there and so on. You should try touching your processor too

The modem problem. Sometimes you got to believe that there are 'interference' during the connection. It'll work perfectly fine as always if it was a cable, such as fibre optic.

I don't have DVD on my computer though but you know, DVD are slightly heavier running than a CD It takes quite a lot of juice to run anything. Burning CD's are recommended to close down all programs. Have you ever experience touching your DVD-Rom while its processing?

[jmichna]

Originally posted by Dj-Icer
Its normal having HDD got hotter coz all the programs are running in there and so on. ...

Programs aren't "running" inside of hard drives

Data (files) are written to, stored, then and read from the hard drive into memory, where they are accessed by the CPU, which executes the code instructions.

Drives do generate heat because they have mechanical components (platters) that are spinning (driven by electric current). That's where the heat comes from