[Disputant]

I have horrible luck with breaking hard drives for some reason. It is not system specific because this has happened on several AMDs and I think my current drive may be going down that road.

Not sure why this is happening, but I have toasted 2 IBMs (no surprise) and my WD SE is starting to make subtle noises and I noticed that it was quite hot. Perhaps my CD rom is warming it up, it is a crampt case.

Who all has add on cooling units/fans on their hard drives? And do they work well? I ordered a 2 fan bottom mount unit and a new larger aluminum case last week, hoping to keep this drive and my other components from joining my IBMs.

A side note, I do keep the drives defragged and I am running SP Pro on it at the moment. My board and CPU temps are fine as well, just the HD.

***On second thought, I probably should have posted this under cooling, sorry.

[Sonny]

I cool my HDDs since they do get a bit warm in RAID0. My case, PC70, has 2 X 80mm fans blowing on the HDD cage. Anything that gets hot deserves to be cooled though this might only be part of the solution to your problem. Look into other areas that might cause storage device failures like your PSU.

[firebird79]

i cool my hard drive too! coz my hd are 10k scsi!! hot and loud

[billstuck]

I have two WD 800JB drives with a 120mm front case fan blowing on them. I've noticed when I have very high disk activity like multiplexing audio and video streams the fan keeps temps about 5 or 6C lower then without them.

What temps do you have on your drives? MBM should be able to read the WD since I know it reads mine.

I'm sitting at 30C right now 1C over my mobo temp at idle

[slater3333uk]

I made a couple of mini sinks and put them on the chips of my 2 maxtors which i have in raid0

I also have a single 80mm fan blowing across the two. I think the drives that i have run fairly cool anyway so ive not had any problems with hdd heat and system unsatbility

[Quick69GTO]

I have a Antec SOHO server case with an 80mm fan blowing on two 3 year old IBM drives. Those drives have never failed me.
I also have a modded Gateway 2000 server case with an 80mm fan blowing on four hard drives. They stay very cool.
If you can tolerate the added noise, always try to mount a fan to blow on your hard drives.
Good luck!

[Disputant]

You input is greatly appreciated, think I am going to start off with air cooling on the drive and definitely going to put a sensor on the drive to monitor temps from now on.

Don't know why I have neglected cooling there until now. Maybe I secretly wanted my drives to die so I would have an excuse to buy newer faster ones.

[Cjwinnit]

My IBM is in my case on the floor of it, and the WD is on the top of the case with an 80mm fan blowing on it, case cover off.

[Ralf Hutter]

I started cooling my drives back when everyone started having trouble with the 75GXPs. I alwat use a temp monitoring program like Dtemp or MBM to monitor the temps of my drives at all times.

I've found that it doesn't even take much airflow to cool the drives down quite a bit. I run Antec SX10x0 and SLK3700 cases that have the provision to have a case fan right in front of the drive so that's what I do. I've found that a 5V or 7V panaflo L1A is plenty sufficient to keep my drives running about 6-8°C cooler than with no active cooling at all. I will not run a drive in my computers that's not actively cooled. My data is too important to risk.

[aftermath]

i have 6 drives.
I cool the four in my raid with 4 80mm fans the drives are all in 5 1/4 bays.
The raid disks do not allow me to moniter the temperatures with a utillity that can read smart data but one of my other disks that is not cooled activly (its cool by the positive case presure escaping past the grill in frunt of it) reads at 31*c i dont know how acurat that is tho.

[Perre]

using one 80mm fan, blowing straight onto my discs

[CM50K]

i have 2* wd360gd´s in raid0 and i have watercooled them

[Perre]

very nice hehe

[Crism]

Originally posted by Perre
very nice hehe

very nice indeed

[billstuck]

Looks very nice, but i bet they'd be cooler with air cooling and some space between them. The top and bottom especially get hot not the sides. Your cooling very little surface area and unimportant surface area at that.

[Robbie]

I've always recomended cooling anything 60gigs and above. I h ave a $7 dual fan heat sync on mine. Works VERY well.
Cool it or lose it.
Rob

[Disputant]

I really like the looks of that water cooler setup. Nice job!

As I look at my checkbook...

[Rav]

Originally posted by CM50K
[B]i have 2* wd360gd´s in raid0 and i have watercooled them

Are those custom? Nice, I like that setup.

I air cool all my hard drives. I thought I had killed one once after reformatting it a couple times in a row, it was burning hot . After that I always actively cooled my drives at least in my main machines. Now I just need to deal with the vibration of my pump causing a performace drop...

-Rav

[Giblet Plus!]

My 15k SCSI drive used to get pretty hot. It, and my 5.4k Maxtor sit on converters in the two top bays of my dragon style case. I added a 120mm blowhole on the top (running @5V), and now the SCSI drive is somewhere between cool and warm to the touch.

Watercooling your drives (especially sub 10k ones) is overkill. All it does is kill the flowrate for the rest of your system.

[Stedeman]

You don't need to add a sensor as all the newer HDD have on built in so any SMART program should be able to read it.
P.S. I also cool all mine down with an Antec heat sink and dual fans setup. I did have to pop the fans off to wrap the wires around them because they where so long (now they are just long enough to fit into the HDD and act as a pass through)