HardDrive Coolers....Any good?

[AlanSr]

Are Harddrive coolers any good?
Do harddrives actually get that hot?

[cowanrg]

Originally posted by AlanSr
Are Harddrive coolers any good?
Do harddrives actually get that hot?

do they get hot? hell yeah. i have a 40GB, ATA100, 7200rpm, and let me tell you, i leave my computer on 24/7 with folding, and divx stuff, and its going almost constantly. it heats up very good... i have had it be warn (not painfully hot, but still very toasty). your HD can get really warm. doesnt really hurt it, but it can act as a nice heater for your case...

[Kingslayer]

My FTP server has 7 drives in it. You could about fry an egg on the top of it, and it produces enough heat to raise the temp of a 15x15 room by 20 degrees over the course of a day. So, yes, they put off some heat.

Now when it comes to drive coolers I see a trend that I don't like. Most have fans that suck air from outside the case across the drive and into your case. I think that this is a totally flawed design. Most of us have designed our cases to keep the internal temp as low as possible, and this drive bay design will defeat that by bringing in hot air pulled across the drive. I usually get these type of drive coolers because they are cheap and then just turn the fans around to pull cool air from inside the case, across the drives, then exhaust the hot air out the front of the case. This way it doesn't raise your internal temps.

This really only hold true if you mount your drives up in the 5 1/4" bays. I have only seen 1 drive cooler that fits into a 3 1/2" bay where most of us mount our drives. This was at www.1coolpc.com and it was a touch expensive.

[AlanSr]

Your right Kingslayer,
if I get one i would trun the fans around.

I think it would look good with a window to go with it. And for $22 its not to bad.

[foxmulder]

I thing it depends on the model also.
I run a IBM 40 Gig 7200 RPM Drive that never gets warm enough that I'd consider cooling it.

7 drives however is of course another matter...

[Morphoius]

My harddrive was squiling at me so i made a little mount and put a fan on it. The squieling went away and instead of being hot the hard drive is cool to the touch. i assume also that your hard drives life is extended substancialy by active cooling it.

[IFMU]

First... yes as they have all said... HDDs can get very hot... My bro in law had a 20gig7200rpm going and it was right below the cdrom drive (small case) and it would actually freeze up.. he thought he was going to have to format again and I went over to take a look as I replaced his NIC card (as it went bad) and I put my hand in-between the hdd and cdrom and almost got burned... yes it was THAT HOT... not exageratting...

But we bought a hdd cooler and the problems faded into nuthingness real fast...

Second... I had an idea... I personally dont like the ducts that go over the motherboards.. just look tacky... but Just My Opinion... but I was thinking about the idea that since you dont want to put the hot air inside the case from the hdd's... why not make a duct to go from over the hdd's to a blowhole in the top of the case or even out a back fan? It would still keep the air flowing, it wouldnt put the hot air inside the case per-se, but would also keep the hot air from blowing out the front right into your face... and would be an interesting little mod... I might give that a try on my dual case mod!

[SteenkyBastage]

from my experience with hard drives, they can build up a lot of heat if you dont cool them. but that takes a good ammount of time (hours). i also would (and currently do) have the fans drawing air out of the case to cool the hard drives. however, they put out so little heat that i really dont think it'd make squat for a difference if you have them sucking in or blowing out.

the hard drives themselves can get real toasty, but they dont (like a cpu) put out all that heat right away, they just build up gradually over time. so if you had a fan suckig outside air over them, i would really really doubt that you'd see a 1C temp change between the air as soon as it hits the fan, and the air right after it passes over the hard drive. the ammout of heat that is put out would not be able to change the air temp since the air is being constantly refreshed.

why i think this... if i turn on my 3x ata-100 40GB hard drives (all bunched up near each other) and dont put the fan on them, it still takes a good deal of time for them to feel warm to the touch. i'm gonna go out on a limb and make a nice easy to use figure of 1 hour before they feel uncomfortably warm to the touch (not a set in stone time that they magically become hot, just a ballpark idea of when they do). during this time, they may have got up to say 45C (as the back of my vodoo5 runs at 55C and i can tell you that the hard drives never feel near that hot).

if they take that long to warm up, but yet it only takes 30 seconds to bring them back to cool temperature once i kickstart the fan... well, from that i deduce that a steady flow of air over them should carry off heat so rapidly that the air itself shouldn't be affected much.

my (lengthy) $.02

if i felt motivated enough i would hook up 2 of my probes to see if the air temp changes, but it's almost 3:00 and i've put enough time into this as it is... heh

[FuzzyNY]

Anybody using those 15K rpm harddrive? Just cauious that what kind of cooling do you need for them?



Fuzz