A hard drive’s spec sheet usually displays information about the operating and non-operating temperatures. Most manufacturers set the operating temperature threshold at 5° Celsius to 55° Celsius. Others may have a slightly different threshold going up to 60° Celsius.

A lot of things can happen if a hard drive reaches non-operating temperatures. This ranges from data corruption and data loss to crashes and even hardware failures.

While it is not likely that most computer users will ever experience they hard drives reaching critical temperatures, it can happen if they work in environments with unusually low or high temperatures. Other reasons can be bad or no cooling, or other hardware close to the hard drive that is emitting lots of heat.

How can you check a hard drive’s temperature level? Most modern hard drives support a technology called SMART, which stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology. Programs can read and display SMART data.

One of my favorite programs for the job is Speedfan, a lightweight program that reads the majority of PC sensors.

Speedfan scans the hardware for sensors and displays its findings directly in the main interface.

The hard drives are listed on the right side. Normal, falling and critical temperatures are all indicated with icons which makes identification easier. You can alternatively click on the SMART tab, select one of the hard drives available and look at the SMART values for additional information. Very interesting in this regard is the temperature reading, as it lists the worst temperature the hard drive has ever reached on the system.

You can use the value to find out if the selected hard drive ever reached critical temperature levels on your computer.

If it did, you may want to start thinking about proper backup of data and replacement.

To avoid these risks users should monitor the temperature of their PC. Not constantly but every know and then to make sure that they do not rise to critical levels.

Disk Alarm can monitor one hard drive of the computer. The free program displays a selection for one of the connected hard drives and will update the program interface immediately with the drive’s name and temperature.

This temperature reading gets updated frequently. Users from the United States can switch to Fahrenheit, everyone else in the world should be fine with the degrees in Celsius.

One interesting feature is an alarm that can be configured if the disk temperature rises above a specified temperature level. Visual alarms are displayed in this case, with the option to add sounds to the alarm as well.

The program can be set to be always on top, or placed in the system tray where a tooltip displays the current drive temperature on mouse over.

Disk Alarm is a tiny program for Windows that requires elevated rights to be started, at least under Vista and Windows 7. The program requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.

I still have a machine that tends to work pretty hard, so I like to keep tabs on what the temp is doing at any given moment. Fortunately this is easy (when you have a PC that has the hardware setup to monitor the temperature. If you do, then you are nearly half-way there. In this article I am going to take you the rest of the way and show you how to monitor you systems temperature in Linux with a few simple gadets.

Panel or “widget”?

There are two ways in which I will show you how to monitor your temperature from your panel and/or using a screenlet. Both are incredibly simple to use and each have a very different look and different feel about them, but both tackle the same task.

GNOME Panel

Let’s first take a look at adding temperature sensors to the GNOME Panel. This is fairly straight-forward. If you right-click the GNOME panel you will see the entry “Add to panel”. Select that and, from the resulting window, scroll down until you see “Hardware Sensors Monitor”. Select that applet and click the Add button. You will immediately see a new applet on your panel (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

With this monitor running you will see temperatures for all the cores in your CPU as well as the motherboard temperature. In the Figure you see above, the farthest temp on the left will be the acpi temp. You also see five other temperatures. You can add or remove sensors if your right-click, select preferences, click on the Sensors tab, and check what you do or do not want to see. The more cores on your CPU, the more temperature sensors will appear.

Screenlet

My favorite way to keep track of temperature is through the Screenlets application. By default there will be a particular screenlet called Ring Sensors. But before you even use it, you have to install Screenlets. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software tool.
2. Search for “screenlets” (no quotes).
3. Mark Screenlets for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

That’s it! Now click Applications > Accessories > Screenlets and the screenlets icon will appear in your notification area. Right-click on the Screenlets icon and choose Screenlets Manager. When this window open scroll down until you see Ring Sensors. Double click the ring sensors to add it to the desktop.

By default, Ring Sensors will not be monitoring your CPU temperature. You have to tell this screenlet what to monitor. Right-click on the ring and select Properties. In this window (see Figure 1) click on the Options tab and then the Sensors sub-tab. From that window select the core you want to monitor and then click Close.

You will now see a ring sensor monitoring the temperature of the core you choose to monitor. If you need to monitor more than one core, just add another Ring Sensor applet and configure it to monitor a different core.

Figure 3

When on your desktop, the Ring Sensor will look like those shown in Figure 3. You can adjust the size of each ring by right clicking a ring, selecting Size, and then selecting a percentage.

Final thoughts

There are plenty of other ways to monitor the temperature of your system. You can monitor the hard drive temperature and you can monitor the acpi temperature – both via command line! But keeping track of your CPU temperature will go a long way to help you know the health of your system.

Web Temp has been created for that purpose. It is compatible with several Windows temperature monitors, including the previously mentioned Speedfan, but also HWMonitor, CPUCool, and several tools that monitor the temperature of the graphic’s adapter. It makes use of the temperature monitoring options of those applications to provide in depth statistics about a PC’s temperature levels.

The statistics software is offered as a freeware and paid version. Some options are not available in the freeware version, including the ability to save statistics, use the text uploader, configure an emergency power off, or a Web Temp gallery, which offers storage space to host temperature images on the web.

Web Temp scans the computer for installed temperature monitoring software, and will automatically use the information if a compatible program is found. The developers suggest to run one cpu temp monitor and one video card monitor max at the same time, to avoid conflicting temperature reports.

web temp

The program displays statistics about the computer in its core interface. On top are the temperature levels in a graph, below that temperatures for each cpu core, and system voltage readings.

The lower part of the program window contains fan speed information, allocated memory and cpu usage. Additional graphs can be enabled in the program’s options. It is for instance possible to display network traffic of up to four network adapters, or the hard drive capacity of selected partitions. The graphs are highly configurable. It is possible to remove information from the graphs; The application displays information about ten fans by default for instance, which can be reduced so that only the active fan speeds are reported to the user.

The options are also the location where a ftp server can be configured, which can then be used to store temperature images. Temperatures can be reported in Celsius or Fahrenheit.

Web Temp is configured to automatically start SpeedFan during program start, this option can be disabled, if SpeedFan is not the temperature monitor of choice.

temperature monitor

Web Temp Basic Features

• WebTemp reads temperatures, voltages and fan speeds from several hardware monitoring tools
• it can read RAM and CPU usage, CPU frequency, network traffic, hard disk memory and battery capacity on its own
• it creates an image which enables you getting an overview of all the values and their condition in the past few hours
• furthermore there is a display mode for the past 24 hours
• a banner-style display which only displays temperatures or network traffic over time
• another small display called “Light” which just shows you current temperatures and fan speeds
• both of these images can be displayed transparently on top of your desktop
• additionally they can be uploaded to any FTP server of yours
• it is possible to customize the colors and names of statistics and sensors
• there is an extra window which provides you with system information like real time CPU frequency
• WebTemp consumes very little processor time and memory
• you can choose to get notifications when new versions become available
• setup does not copy any files into your windows or system directory nor does uninstall leave behind any of WebTemp’s registry settings

Web Temp is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system.

It can for instance happen that a PC crashes regularly because of overheating issues. Open Hardware Monitor is a portable software program for the Windows operating system that displays various realtime information about the installed components and can be used as a hardware and temperature monitor.

The following hardware sensors and components are supported by the software program:

CPU core sensors

• Intel Core 2, Core i3/i5/i7
• AMD K8 (0Fh family), K10 (10h family)

Mainboard sensors

• ITE IT8716F, IT8718F, IT8720F, IT8726F
• Fintek F71862, F71869, F71882, F71889
• Winbond W83627DHG, W83627DHG-P, W83627EHF, W83627HF, W83627THF, W83667HG, W83667HG-B

GPU sensors

• Nvidia
• ATI

Hard disks

• S.M.A.R.T. sensors (optional)

Fan controllers

• T-Balancer bigNG (direct acces to USB-Serial driver, no T-Balancer Server needed)

The application lists the computer hardware and displays temperatures, voltages and other related information in its main interface. Both the current value and the max value are displayed which can give the user an indication if the hardware is running within its limits or if it could be the cause for (future) problems.

The portable nature of the software makes it an ideal companion for portable devices or repair disks. Open Hardware Monitor can be downloaded from the developer website. It is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows and requires the Microsoft .net Framework. The source code of the program is also offered on the webpage.

One option to monitor computer temperatures is a software based temperature monitor. These programs usually draw their information from the hardware components (for instance by reading SMART information from hard drives). HWMonitor is but one of the many programs out there that can monitor computer temperatures.

The portable software program is compatible with common temperature sensor chips on the computer’s motherboard, cpu thermal sensors, hard drive smart technologies and video card temperatures. All temperatures are displayed in the main interface upon startup divided by component.

The program will automatically monitor the temperatures of supported hardware components for as long as it is running. The temperatures are then displayed with their min, max and mean values to give the user information about the range and standard temperatures of the computer system. The temperatures can be saved in a text file. There are unfortunately no notification options available that inform the user if the temperature reaches critical levels, something that other temperature monitors provide.

HWMonitor is a lightweight software that does not need to be installed. This makes it ideal for portable use. The software can be downloaded from the developer’s website. It is compatible with most Windows operating systems (32-bit and 64-bit).

Real Temp displays various information about the cpu. The information are not limited to the cpu temperatures but also the model of the cpu, clock speeds and cpu load.

The main purpose of Real Temp is however cpu temperature monitoring. The temperatures of each cpu core are displayed in columns in the program’s interface. They are divided into various sections that display the maximum and minimum temperatures as well as the current cpu temperature.

The time that the maximum and minimum temperature levels were reached are also displayed in the program which is great for troubleshooting purposes. Many advanced settings are available that can change the information that are displayed, integrate external applications such as RivaTuner or settings that define how and where the application is displayed.

The CPU temperature monitor Real Temp uses less than one Megabyte of computer memory when running minimized in the system tray. Computer users with Intel cpus might want to give the software program a try.