Question about Zalman passive hdd cooler

I'm looking at buying one of the Zalman passive hdd coolers to get the heatpipes in them. (In turn, I plan to use them in a different project that I'll detail at a later time. )

Question for anybody who has one: how maleable / bendable are those heatpipes? Could a person with some limited tools (but nothing elaborate such as machining tools) bend the heatpipes into gentle curves?

Another question: If not, where could I find a few heatpipes for use in such a project?

Thanks! -- Paul

I found this explanation of heat pipes:

http://www.thermacore.com/hpt_how.htm

I don't think you can do this. If you start bending these things, it would be very easy to disrupt the flow inside the tube and/or lose the vacuum. You also would have to use the whole thing because if you cut them apart, you will also lose the vacuum. Good luck if you try it.

Im pretty new with this but do HDs heat up significantly or something or is it just SATAs, etc that only do this? Ive never had mine heat up a lot at all, it always is cool to the touch. If someone could fill me in, I'd be much obliged.

If you have highspeed drives like raptors, and not a lot of airflow near them, then they can actualy burn your finger. I have 2x120gb's in raid, and before I put a case fan directly on them they were a burn hazard to any reaching into the case.

Hi, and thanks for the responses!

For some reason, I'm not getting any auto-notifications to any of the threads I'm subscribed to ... (grr!)

Thanks for the link on the technical aspects of the heatpipe. Actually, I was indeed aware of those aspects. In fact, I will be counting on them. The better heatpipes can and indeed do work with bends in them, and that's part of their use: to be able to "guide" heat away from a heat source, even if around a corner. (Examples: the Zalman VGA cooler, and my SP-94 HS.) The better ones have a wick to transport the condensed coolant back to the heat source, and the evaporated coolant can more freely as a gas through the tube.

I believe the key is to not crimp the tube. That's why I was trying to gauge just how "bendable" or malleable they are.

As for cooling hard drives, most don't really require it if there's sufficient airflow in the case. However, they certainly can't last long if they're too hot. Back in the day of the IBM "deathstar" debacle, it was speculated that heat may have been to blame for those problems. (They didn't appear to be well-designed for heavy usage.)

I'll let the cat out of the bag on my project a bit. I want to make a silent drive enclosure for my hdd. There is a product on the market (SilentDrive) that works well for 5400 RPM drives, but I don't trust it to anything faster than that, as my drive can and does get heavy usage at times. I would like to make a foam-based enclosure that uses the aluminum side pieces and heatpipes from the Zalman kit to lead the heat out of the enclosure and to a passive heatsink.

I think that a properly-designed enclosure can easily handle a modern, fast hard drive. I just don't think that any on the market are properly designed for the use that I envision. -- Paul

bump. Anybody at all with experience with these?? -- Paul