Best HD air cooler for a Raptor?

Looking for opinions/suggestions on a good/best air cooler for a Raptor. I've been scoping this HD cooler over @ sidewinder. Any and all help is appreciated!

http://www.sidewindercomputers.com/blaculhardri.html

Your hard drives don't need to be cool, you can fry an egg on one and you're all right. Unless you're trying to cool something else by keeping case temperatures low don't bother with one.

tom10167 said:

Your hard drives don't need to be cool, you can fry an egg on one and you're all right. Unless you're trying to cool something else by keeping case temperatures low don't bother with one.

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I agree.

I do have a cooler but it is a case fan that pulls air in the front and over the hard drives. Use smartfan to monitor your raptor's temperature. Mine stays a little above ambient.

Ok, fair enough... main motivation is to move the Raptor up to an open 5 1/4" bay to make room for my new SATA II WDs in a lower drive cage. Went with this setup available @ Sidewinder.

http://www.sidewindercomputers.com/blcf3hadrco.html

Although seemingly unnessessary, I would like to keep some airflow over my Raptor. If it's too loud, I'll just slap it on my Sunbeam to calm it down.

Thanks for the comments tom & BC|Wulf. Cheers!

If you plan on moving it to an upper bay, then that may not be a bad idea. A little airflow is nice, so you always have hte option of controlling the fans like you said.

Godd luck!

Yep... I like to keep my HDs as cool as possible. I have had problems in the past with drives overheating and dropping out... was not fun. I generally don't like to stack them directly on top of one another either... like making a waffle iron out of hard drives. Unfortunately I will most likely be forced to stack both of my WD SATA II drives directly on top of each other due to the position of my PCI-E card and the drive cage. The upside of this being that there is already an intake fan blowing through that drive cage, so I will get some airflow over the drives regardless. Here's a link to the WDs I picked up. This is gonna be a sweet @SS, uber fast, RAID array! 16MB cache, NCQ, 3.0Gb SATA, the works!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136003

An Intake Fan should be ALL the cooling one needs for HD's. I have a single 120mm fan (at low speed) butted-up against 2 36Gig Raptors, and 2 300Gig 16MB Maxtors, and they stay cool and collected. If you ever have a HD out of your case (but still hooked up), look how hot it gets sitting on the floor. Add a fan to blow over it, and watch those temps plummit in like 1 minute!

Airflow is all you need - no fancy "HD Coolers" IMO...

Your hard drives don't need to be cool, you can fry an egg on one and you're all right. Unless you're trying to cool something else by keeping case temperatures low don't bother with one.

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I wouldn't go that far - keeping hard drives cool is pretty important to ensure long lifespans. I always make sure my hard drives and in a good environment, and I have never had one fail on me. Fortunately, it doesn't take much - a Panaflo L1A at 7v in a rack of 3 drives would cut it, I'm sure. I would just be wary of putting a hotter drive like the raptor in a 5.25" bay without some kind of air moving over it.

You know what I mean.

I don't sweat it.

Mmkay. It's pretty hard to tell what a person is saying on these here internets.

My milkshake brings all the CuTe GiRlZ to the yard.

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I enjoy this every time I read it, FYI.