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hard drives are hot!!

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Eil Atan

Member
Joined
Jun 20, 2001
I opened my case and my hard drives are pretty hot... my processor isn't running toooooo hot, and my ambient temp in the case is just over 31C in an un-air conditioned room... but my hard drives are really really hot... what should I do? I don't have a room for those hard drive fans they sell, but could I install a fan in my case cover that blows air right onto the drives? would that helP?
 
I didn't have any drive mounts, so both my drives are stacked right on top of each other..and a little personal fan keeps 'em both cool to the touch..

..of course, when I move the fan to blow on the processor/agp more directly..they drives get really hot....
 
i am going to mod my case tommorrow and saturday, so I guess i'll add one more fan to the mix... an 80 mm should do the job right?
 
I have one 51 CFM 92mm fan in a blow hole on the right side of my case focused on four 7200 RPM and one 5400 RPM drives. They stay nice and cool.
 
There is a good article about this here. It is regarding making your harddrives more quiet, but as a nice sideeffect it also helps cool down the hard drive. basically he made a"sandwich" of two aluminum plates with the harddrive in between them, and some sound proofing foam. Check it out.

 
We have an old Dell here with a 1.7gb HDD that was WHINY!!! It was loud and obnoxious. I got so many complaints about it, I decided I had to soundproof the drive someway. It was early, and I was really creative and inventive that day.

I ended up creating a rather effective hard drive cooler/silencer. I'm gonna write an article up about it, and some pics since the Dell has just been retired so I can take the cooler out. It'll get some laughs, but its effectiveness is quite surprising!

Now, the 1.3gb drive doesn't get too hot, but some of these newer drives sure do...and we all know heat is bad, so some sore of HDD cooling is good. Best thing to do is mount the drive in a 5.25 slot with the brackets, and get some good airflow around it. I don't think theres much of a ponit to attaching small heatsinks all over the drive...I'm sure it'd help, but I doubt its necessary...just some good airflow can go al ong way in cooling a HDD.

Since I mentioned it, I'll have to get to work on explaining that hdd cooler/silencer this weekend!

Mike
 
Stacking HD is a good way to kill them.
There is no where for the heat to go from the bottom drive. If you have to rig up something to mount them or at least seperate them somehow. This is probably why they are so hot
 
I just did a mod to my case where i took a 80mm fan and using 2 5.25 bay covers and my dremel cut a hole and mounted the fan so it blows over my HD's, works like a charm. Next step is a 120mm blowhole in the top
 
rocknindy (Jul 13, 2001 03:37 p.m.):
I just did a mod to my case where i took a 80mm fan and using 2 5.25 bay covers and my dremel cut a hole and mounted the fan so it blows over my HD's, works like a charm. Next step is a 120mm blowhole in the top

I want to do that on my next case mod. Cool idea..(no pun intended)
 
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