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When is HD cooling needed?

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SPaWN23

New Member
Joined
Apr 10, 2001
I've read a couple people's posts about what products they are using for cooling their hard drives, but I'm not to clear on which cases you will need to cool your hard drive. I know that increasing the FSB increases the voltage to all your devices, which causes them to heat up ( right? ). So what temps are dangerous to your HD and how do you monitor the temp on the HD? Also, what are some other common devices to break when you pump up the FSB?
 
I think hardrive cooling is one of those unecessary things along with south bridge cooling, the manufacturers design them to wotk at full potential in cases with no cooling other than the psu fan, I would say that they are fine up to about 50oC, of course if you are overclocking they are going to get slightly warmer but not like the cpu does, I would say you only need to cool hardrives when you have a lot in a case and they are all mounted near each other, I have seen someone with a badly ventilated case and he mounted 2 drives 1 above the other and was getting all kinds of problems until I moved one to another mounting point at which point they worked fine, the electrical chips on a hardrive don't really get that hot and the actual platters only get warm from friction with the air, which also has a slight cooling effect I would think so they don't get that warm
 
It's conventional wisdom that 7200 rpm IDE drives don't demand dedicated HDD coolers. Nonetheless, they do get toasty and letting a drive get too hot shortens its life, and can lead to unstable operation. Putting a 7200 rpm IBM in my box raised the internal temp of my case by 5F. I blasted it from below with an 80 mm case fan until I got off my duff and cut my case for better fannage.

It's said that 10000 rpm SCSI HDD's must have drive coolers. I've got two of them that haven't seen service yet. I bought one 5.25" to 3.5" cooler/converter. The other SCSI drive WILL have its own cooler before it spins up for the first time. These drives will allegedly burn your hand if they're not cooled properly.
10000 rpm IDE HDD's are said to be soon upon us. Buy stock in HDD cooler manufacturers? Might be a good move.
 
I've been using a 10k Seagate SCSI as a boot drive, and it gets very hot. I bought one of those harddrive coolers with a huge heatsink and triple fans to cool it off. If nothing else, cooling, I believe, will help prolong a drive's lifespan.
 
All I do is make sure I have air moving over the top of them from a fan. That makes a huge difference alone. I dont really think anymore is needed. Without the fan they are hot to the touch. With it they are always cool.
 
WOW, thanks for the great responses. I have one 7200 rpm HD and another older one (not 7200rpm) mounted below it. I also have a fan drawing air in from the bottom of the case, two fans mounted in a card in a PCI slot shooting air up and a fan in my top drive bay blowing the heat out of the case, doesn't sound like I need a HD cooler.
 
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