How hot should it get?

[SaiyanZ]

How hot should the power adapter for a laptop get? That small black box thingy which converts the current. I felt it the last couple of days and it is extremely hot to the touch. Enough to be too hot to hold after 5 seconds or so. Don't think I remember it ever getting this hot.

Same story for my external hard drive, Toshiba 1TB from makro which I bought a month ago. It seems to get extremely hot after using for about an hour. Is that normal?

Not sure if these things have coolers or if they're going to malfunction.

 

[Archer]

Hmmm, it has been really hot here the last few days, but even so, the power brick should never be too hot to hold. It should just be warm. Same goes for your HDD, which gets damaged very quickly at high temperatures. I would strongly recommend backing up whatever important info you have on that drive.

 

[Messugga]

I would strongly recommend backing up whatever important info you have on that drive.

Agreed. Once you get to tempts hot enough to burn you, you're looking at a serious risk of hard drive failure. To give you an idea, my server's set to send email notifications and shut down when the drives hit anything above 40 degrees. Admittedly, this is quite low, but room temperature rarely gets out of the 20's. I'd start worrying if temps went above 50 though and at 60...yeah.

I just Google'd the specs on my drives and their operating temperature is 0 ~ 60°C and non-operating temps are -40 ~ 70°C

 

[wrinklyo]

I agree with the other posters - it is a bit too hot. This is sometimes indicative of the laptop batteries fading out - they can draw a lot of extra current from the little power supply. If the laptops older than 3 or 4 years this could be the problem. Why the external hard drive is hot is another issue - unless the HDD is faulty and drawing too much current, in which case the PSU will get hot as a result as well. Does the PSU get hot without the HDD connected? USB ports are supposed to be limited to 500mA, which is not enough to make the PSU hot, unless the HDD uses multiple USB ports. Try running without the HDD as an experiment anyway, just to eliminate possibilities..

Backing up the HDD is a good idea in any event.



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[SaiyanZ]

The hard drive and laptop brick seemed to be fine last night. Just warm and not hot as hell. Must have been the extremely hot weather the previous day or two. It was probably over 35 degrees in my room.

 

[Aharon]

Sounds too hot - I have felt them "uncomfortable to hold" after 5 secs, but not "unable to hold"

 

[Pada]

I usually leave my laptop (Dell Inspiron 9400)'s PSU on its side so that it doesn't get that hot.

Is it your Asus K50ID laptop's charger that gets that hot?

The PSU would also get hotter if you draw more power from it, so it could be that it is simply under spec'd (eg. designed for a 65W laptop instead of for a 90W one).