The growth of the hard disk drive's (HDD) capacity and its high performance have been instrumental in meeting the demands of a diverse spectrum of applications. However, thermal effects in HDD may cause several problems, such as thermal expansion, which causes read/write error due to misalignment, and thermal protrusion, which may cause contact between the magnetic head and disk, resulting in a HDD crash. To study the effects of temperature generated within an HDD, a Hitachi HDD (operating at 15000 rpm) was subjected to 12 different ambient temperatures, while thermal distributions of its head cap and disk were obtained using an infrared thermography system. The results show that the temperature within the HDD increases with the ambient temperature and time. However, the different ambient temperatures did not affect the thermal distribution pattern within the HDD. By comparing the results with ANSYS simulation, it was noted that the simulated result lacks details on some thermal conditions of certain regions, and the results of the simulated temperatures of the components within the HDD were also observed to be overpredicted.