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Trying to diagnose and fix an overheating Acer 5735 laptop, running speedfan and doing general workload to try and cause the overheat conditions. I notice that windows xp is badly fragmented according to defraggler, at 58% fragmentation.

So I defrag whilst watching the speedfan window, which was at the start reporting high warning style symbols for all of the sensors.

After the defrag, I rebooted and ran a few programs, and even defraggler again and the sensors in speedfan all reported green i.e. not high.

Wondering if there is a correlation between windows fragmentation causing the hard drive to work harder and produce more heat inside the laptop?

dont want to just assume that the problems are resolved, so either speedfan is not accurate enough or fragmentation can lead to additional hard drive heat?

All comments or suggestions welcome.

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I have my doubts. –  Daniel R Hicks Sep 7 '12 at 9:42
Correlation does not prove causation. Did you repeat exactly your previous tests that resulted in heat warnings? –  Justin Pearce Sep 7 '12 at 14:06
This is not possible to answer. Even if somebody could answer this question, the question itself, would not apply to anyone but your situation. –  Ramhound Sep 7 '12 at 14:20
Yes thats the point im trying to make, i think its too anecdotal to be true and was looking to gather some thoughts on its plausibility. And yes I repeated the same test of running defraggler on the main drive along with a program called heavyload, thanks. –  Marko Sep 7 '12 at 14:20
To defragment your hard drive, the defragmentation process will have to do at least some computation, which will cause CPU use to increase. That will increase heat and, thus, fan speed. Additionally, heavy disc use can cause additional heat inside the laptop, this could further increase fan speed. –  Oliver Salzburg Sep 7 '12 at 14:29
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There are three components that consume more power when the hdd is busy defragging:

  1. The CPU - the computation which block has to be moved to what position has to be done somewhere.
  2. The SATA controller - if no data is transfered it enters an low power idle state. This can also affect the counter part controller in the HDD.
  3. The HDD itself - a typical 2.5" HDD has different power consumption depending on what state it is. The power consumption ranges in the different modes from typically ~0.1 Watt up to 2.0 Watt for a 5400rpm model.
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