Now funnily enough, i use SMC fan control and i did tend to keep the fan revs up to max to keep my MacBook cool.............and my fan failed after 7 months......
That sucks.
I have not bumped my fans up to max for fear of that very consequence, so I have only bumped up the speeds on the proc by 400 rpm and the HDD more significantly, but still by only 1000 rpm, far less than the maximum allowable of over 6000 rpm from the looks of it.
Replaced under applecare i now keep the fans revs down to the normal speeds, unless i feel it needs a bit of help in the cooling department.....maybe i just had a bad fan to start with , who knows ?
Good, I'm glad to hear it worked out in the end. As you say, who knows though about the fan - that's a tough one to troubleshoot...
I would be more concerned about the CPU than the hard drive. Hard drives are inexpensive and easy to replace when compared to the cost of replacing the CPU and motherboard.
I appreciate that. The reason I said I am more focused on cooling my HDD rather than my proc though is that my proc seems to be running very comfortably within recommended limits. If it was running excessively hot I would be more concerned, but as such, I am not. The temperature of the hard drive on the other hand gets up there at times, and as I said in my initial post, heat does kill HDDs, so although they are replaceable I'd still like to keep it running at a respectable level to hopefully prolong its longevity.
Increasing fan speeds will over time cause them to wear out quicker as well as creating a higher noise level. Noise doesn't bother some folks though.
Nah, the noise doesn't bother me, as this machine runs amazingly quiet as it is. And as you say, it makes total sense that the more something is used or the more stress that is put on it, it will indeed wear out more quickly, but as I initially questioned (and the reason for this thread), I was just curious if that added stress of a few extra hundred rpm was really significant in the grand scheme of things.
Your concern is real. I have SmcFanControl installed on my MacBook but use it sparingly and only when it's needed. For most of the time I keep it set on the recommended Apple setting for my machine. However, I have found when running WinXP from within Fusion the CPU heats up faster and the fan speed does not increase as quick as it does when running programs from OS X.
Interesting, good to know.
I understand that Apple wouldn't set default fan settings at levels which are not acceptable to start with, so the argument could be made "why even use a utility like this?", but if it doesn't do any harm then I see no reason not to keep your machine running a bit cooler. At the end of the day, perhaps it's not a big deal though except under certain circumstances....
Thanks for the replies so far, much appreciated.
