Hard drive cooling suggestions?

My system is set up with two hard drives and I use XXCopy:

http://www.xxcopy.com/index.htm

to clone one to the other on demand. I do *not* use RAID because I want
control over when a backup copy is made. Unfortunately, I recently fried
my main hard drive and had to send it back.

Yesterday, I received the replacement hard drive from Newegg.com and
have installed it. Since I've now gone through two secondary hard drives
in what I consider to be short order, it's time to figure out why this
is happening. Kony (my thanks to you!) and somebody else (sorry, I can't
find the thread now) suggested that I look into cooling the hard drives.
This makes a lot of sense to me because they're mounted right on top of
one another, and when I touch them after running the computer for a
while, they're both rather warm - bordering on HOT.

Time to cool those puppies.

I've been looking at various fan additions and what I really want to do
is to blow directly ONTO the hard drives in order to maximize heat
removal. This, however, will blow dust onto the hard drives and as Kony
mentioned, "while a drive is sealed, most have a filtered vent hole
still." This means that dust still has a way into the drive, although
it's a difficult path. Thus, I would think that it's better to suck air
away from the drives rather than blow onto them.

Mounting a hard drive in a fan unit that fits into a spare 5.25" bay is
not an option, because I want to cool both hard drives. However, I'm
thinking of additionally adding a 5.25" bay mounted case fan in the
middle bay (I have three) to cool my two DVD drives and provide
additional case ventilation.

But back to the hard drives, I'd like to find something that will mount
so as to suck the hot air right off of the hard drives and out of the
case. I would prefer not to use something that will suck the heat off of
the hard drives and distribute it into the case, but maybe that
additional fan in the 5.25" empty bay will render that concern of no
consequence. Any recommendations?

TIA

--
Regards from John Corliss

On Tue, 18 Oct 2005 03:30:03 -0700, John Corliss
wrote:

But back to the hard drives, I'd like to find something that will mount
so as to suck the hot air right off of the hard drives and out of the
case. I would prefer not to use something that will suck the heat off of
the hard drives and distribute it into the case, but maybe that
additional fan in the 5.25" empty bay will render that concern of no
consequence. Any recommendations?

TIA

Yeah Ive noticed 7200 drives get pretty hot. Thats why I always leave
some space between them. That seems like the minimum you should do.
Most of the people I know as Ive mentioned and on my systems --- HDs
hardly ever fail physically that is. But Ive been using cooling and
spacing them apart and most of PCs from people I know their systems
are modest so they only have one HD so there arent two or 3 of them
all crammed into a small space.

There are probablly all kinds of cooling systems but Ive only seen 3
main ones around here. One is particular to my style of Antec case.
Antec and maybe some others have 3.5 inch drive cages where you can
stick a standard 80mm fan in the front of the removable cage. So its
easy to face it in or out - blowing in or out. Ive only seen it on the
full tower Antec cases.

The others are the belly pan with two dinky fans. All these are 10
bucks or less at COMPUSA and many other places. I think they blow air
in though Im not 100% sure. You might be able to mount them in the
other direction. I cant remember how they are mounted but I assume
they are with screws. The problem with the belly pan is they take up
space. On my system if I use the HDs in the 5.25 slots the belly pans
take up a fair amount of vertical space so that I cant space them the
way I normally do and it reduces the amount of drives I can install.

http://www.compusa.com/products/prod...662&pfp=BROWSE

The other popular one is the 5.25 slot faceplate that has two tiny
fans built in. I assume you can remount the fans outward to blow out
but I dont know. You can find those everywhere even Compusa.
http://www.casecooler.com/514slothardr.html

I havent tried the bellypan on the 3.5 inch but obviously it should
fit as its the same size as the HD it just takes up verical space so
there might be the spacing problem again. I use the 80mm case fan in
the 3,5 cage as I mentioned they have for Antecs.

There are lots of variations Im sure - ones with heatsinks too that
cost way more and jackets with fan cooling etc. Theres those pull out
cases for the 5.25 slots like this with fan cooling

http://www.circotech.com/rm-133w.html



If you are a noise freak then Zalman makes one for the HD thats
noiseless but have no idea if it works.

http://www.casecooler.com/zahehadrco.html


Heres another interesting one that takes up one whole drive slot

http://www.casecooler.com/lahadidrco.html

You need to insure your case is properly ventilated / has airflow.
Decent cases usually have 2 or 3 case fans.
Use a 'cheap' stock case, add much 'extra' hw and you will have problems.
A decent case will cost some 3* more than a stock case.

"John Corliss" wrote in message
...
My system is set up with two hard drives and I use XXCopy:

http://www.xxcopy.com/index.htm

to clone one to the other on demand. I do *not* use RAID because I want
control over when a backup copy is made. Unfortunately, I recently fried
my main hard drive and had to send it back.

Yesterday, I received the replacement hard drive from Newegg.com and
have installed it. Since I've now gone through two secondary hard drives
in what I consider to be short order, it's time to figure out why this
is happening. Kony (my thanks to you!) and somebody else (sorry, I can't
find the thread now) suggested that I look into cooling the hard drives.
This makes a lot of sense to me because they're mounted right on top of
one another, and when I touch them after running the computer for a
while, they're both rather warm - bordering on HOT.

Time to cool those puppies.

I've been looking at various fan additions and what I really want to do
is to blow directly ONTO the hard drives in order to maximize heat
removal. This, however, will blow dust onto the hard drives and as Kony
mentioned, "while a drive is sealed, most have a filtered vent hole
still." This means that dust still has a way into the drive, although
it's a difficult path. Thus, I would think that it's better to suck air
away from the drives rather than blow onto them.

Mounting a hard drive in a fan unit that fits into a spare 5.25" bay is
not an option, because I want to cool both hard drives. However, I'm
thinking of additionally adding a 5.25" bay mounted case fan in the
middle bay (I have three) to cool my two DVD drives and provide
additional case ventilation.

But back to the hard drives, I'd like to find something that will mount
so as to suck the hot air right off of the hard drives and out of the
case. I would prefer not to use something that will suck the heat off of
the hard drives and distribute it into the case, but maybe that
additional fan in the 5.25" empty bay will render that concern of no
consequence. Any recommendations?

TIA

--
Regards from John Corliss

John Corliss wrote:
My system is set up with two hard drives and I use XXCopy:

http://www.xxcopy.com/index.htm

to clone one to the other on demand. I do *not* use RAID because I want
control over when a backup copy is made. Unfortunately, I recently fried
my main hard drive and had to send it back.

Yesterday, I received the replacement hard drive from Newegg.com and
have installed it. Since I've now gone through two secondary hard drives
in what I consider to be short order, it's time to figure out why this
is happening. Kony (my thanks to you!) and somebody else (sorry, I can't
find the thread now) suggested that I look into cooling the hard drives.
This makes a lot of sense to me because they're mounted right on top of
one another, and when I touch them after running the computer for a
while, they're both rather warm - bordering on HOT.

Time to cool those puppies.

I've been looking at various fan additions and what I really want to do
is to blow directly ONTO the hard drives in order to maximize heat
removal. This, however, will blow dust onto the hard drives and as Kony
mentioned, "while a drive is sealed, most have a filtered vent hole
still." This means that dust still has a way into the drive, although
it's a difficult path. Thus, I would think that it's better to suck air
away from the drives rather than blow onto them.

Mounting a hard drive in a fan unit that fits into a spare 5.25" bay is
not an option, because I want to cool both hard drives. However, I'm
thinking of additionally adding a 5.25" bay mounted case fan in the
middle bay (I have three) to cool my two DVD drives and provide
additional case ventilation.

But back to the hard drives, I'd like to find something that will mount
so as to suck the hot air right off of the hard drives and out of the
case. I would prefer not to use something that will suck the heat off of
the hard drives and distribute it into the case, but maybe that
additional fan in the 5.25" empty bay will render that concern of no
consequence. Any recommendations?

TIA

I just found this setup:

http://proline.com/tech/stacker/index.htm

It mounts to the bottom of the case using velcro. I like the way it
leaves a space under the bottom-most drive. Kinda low air flow (only
10.4 cfm total) but that might be enough since it's in addition to spacing.

Looks like it might work if I used it in conjunction with a 5.25" bay
fan setup.

It still amazes me the way that my case's slide-in hard drive mounting
bracket stacks the hard drives so closely together. True stupidity on
the part of some engineer. For the time being I think I'll fabricate an
extension of some sort so that I can get some space between the two hard
drives.

--
Regards from John Corliss

In article , John Corliss
wrote:

My system is set up with two hard drives and I use XXCopy:

http://www.xxcopy.com/index.htm

to clone one to the other on demand. I do *not* use RAID because I want
control over when a backup copy is made. Unfortunately, I recently fried
my main hard drive and had to send it back.

Yesterday, I received the replacement hard drive from Newegg.com and
have installed it. Since I've now gone through two secondary hard drives
in what I consider to be short order, it's time to figure out why this
is happening. Kony (my thanks to you!) and somebody else (sorry, I can't
find the thread now) suggested that I look into cooling the hard drives.
This makes a lot of sense to me because they're mounted right on top of
one another, and when I touch them after running the computer for a
while, they're both rather warm - bordering on HOT.

Time to cool those puppies.

I've been looking at various fan additions and what I really want to do
is to blow directly ONTO the hard drives in order to maximize heat
removal. This, however, will blow dust onto the hard drives and as Kony
mentioned, "while a drive is sealed, most have a filtered vent hole
still." This means that dust still has a way into the drive, although
it's a difficult path. Thus, I would think that it's better to suck air
away from the drives rather than blow onto them.

Mounting a hard drive in a fan unit that fits into a spare 5.25" bay is
not an option, because I want to cool both hard drives. However, I'm
thinking of additionally adding a 5.25" bay mounted case fan in the
middle bay (I have three) to cool my two DVD drives and provide
additional case ventilation.

But back to the hard drives, I'd like to find something that will mount
so as to suck the hot air right off of the hard drives and out of the
case. I would prefer not to use something that will suck the heat off of
the hard drives and distribute it into the case, but maybe that
additional fan in the 5.25" empty bay will render that concern of no
consequence. Any recommendations?

TIA

If you look at this patent application, I don't think anything is
getting through that breather hole :-) The breather hole is only
intended for pressure equilization, when barometric pressure changes.

http://www.wipo.int/ipdl/IPDL-CIMAGE...EMENT_SET=DECL

Example of a commercial breather hole filter:
http://www.donaldson.com/en/diskdriv...ary/000610.pdf

Also, from an IBM disk manual:

"Do not cover the breather hole! Covering the
breather hole may result in loss of data."

I still don't understand why the pressure is so significant. If
you take a computer to Boulder Colorado, the air inside the HDA is
going to get thinner, so big deal ? I wonder if flexure of the
cover is the problem ?

http://www.storagereview.com/guide20...p/packAir.html

No matter how you move air over the disk, the air is a soup of
particles that are monstrous in size compared to the aperture on
the breather filter. A more dangerous situation, would be opening
a bottle of solvent next to the drive, as vapour phase is likely
to be a more effective poison than particulate (even if there is
a diffuser channel).

*******
I built a frame that fits over three 5.25" drive bays, and the
frame holds a fan. That is how the disk drives in one of my
computers get cooled. It pulls cool air from the outside over
the drives. Another of my computers has a fan mounted in front
of one of the drive cages, which performs the same function.

Here is an example of a module for a coolermaster CMstacker case.
It consists of a fan plus HD cage. Some other cases fasten the
fan to the case, and the cage is removable.

http://www.i-tech.com.au/products/item5641.asp

The two enemies of the hard drive, are heat and moisture. The
allowed temperature drops with increased humidity. At 60% R.H. you
are allowed about 35C. (IBM or Hitachi disk OEM manuals have curves
for allowed environmental conditions.) Now, if I am to believe that,
then how do people in tropical countries use these drives ?

http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techl...Deskstar_7K250
"Deskstar 7K250 Specification v1.5 (Serial ATA)" - PDF pg.35
http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/17351B59F3028F4486256D3D0065D995/$file/d7k250S_sp.pdf

Paul

wrote:
John Corliss wrote:

But back to the hard drives, I'd like to find something that will mount
so as to suck the hot air right off of the hard drives and out of the
case. I would prefer not to use something that will suck the heat off of
the hard drives and distribute it into the case, but maybe that
additional fan in the 5.25" empty bay will render that concern of no
consequence. Any recommendations?

Yeah Ive noticed 7200 drives get pretty hot. Thats why I always leave
some space between them. That seems like the minimum you should do.

I totally agree.

Most of the people I know as Ive mentioned and on my systems --- HDs
hardly ever fail physically that is.

I've now had a Maxtor fail after only three years and this most recent,
a Seagate, fail after only 8 months. Heat *must* have been a factor
involved in these failures.

But Ive been using cooling and
spacing them apart and most of PCs from people I know their systems
are modest so they only have one HD so there arent two or 3 of them
all crammed into a small space.

There are probablly all kinds of cooling systems but Ive only seen 3
main ones around here. One is particular to my style of Antec case.
Antec and maybe some others have 3.5 inch drive cages where you can
stick a standard 80mm fan in the front of the removable cage. So its
easy to face it in or out - blowing in or out. Ive only seen it on the
full tower Antec cases.

That is a good idea. I could fabricate a mount using a piece of sheet
metal and mount the fan directly behing the drives.

The others are the belly pan with two dinky fans. All these are 10
bucks or less at COMPUSA and many other places. I think they blow air
in though Im not 100% sure. You might be able to mount them in the
other direction. I cant remember how they are mounted but I assume
they are with screws. The problem with the belly pan is they take up
space.

Right. That's why I kind of ruled them out. I only currently have space
to mount two hard drives internally and that arrangement would take up
the space of one hard drive, limiting me to only one (although cooled)
hard drive.

On my system if I use the HDs in the 5.25 slots the belly pans
take up a fair amount of vertical space so that I cant space them the
way I normally do and it reduces the amount of drives I can install.

http://www.compusa.com/products/prod...662&pfp=BROWSE

The other popular one is the 5.25 slot faceplate that has two tiny
fans built in. I assume you can remount the fans outward to blow out
but I dont know. You can find those everywhere even Compusa.
http://www.casecooler.com/514slothardr.html

That is what I will be using in conjunction with the hard drive cooling
solution I come up with. It will help greatly to cool my DVD drives.

(clipped)
There are lots of variations Im sure - ones with heatsinks too that
cost way more and jackets with fan cooling etc. Theres those pull out
cases for the 5.25 slots like this with fan cooling

http://www.circotech.com/rm-133w.html

Heatsinks work best with a fan on them. The 5.25" pullouts would place a
drive directly between my DVD drives and heat them up more.

If you are a noise freak then Zalman makes one for the HD thats
noiseless but have no idea if it works.

http://www.casecooler.com/zahehadrco.html

The pipes are just heat sinks. I was reading a review on the unit and
one guy had to add a fan.

Heres another interesting one that takes up one whole drive slot

http://www.casecooler.com/lahadidrco.html

I was looking at one of those on the Newegg site. However, it's not as
effective with systems having two hard drives. As I mentioned in another
reply to this thread, I did find this setup:

http://proline.com/tech/stacker/index.htm

which I will be looking into.

Thanks very much for your reply.

--
Regards from John Corliss

Paul wrote:
John Corliss wrote:
(clipped)
But back to the hard drives, I'd like to find something that will mount
so as to suck the hot air right off of the hard drives and out of the
case. I would prefer not to use something that will suck the heat off of
the hard drives and distribute it into the case, but maybe that
additional fan in the 5.25" empty bay will render that concern of no
consequence. Any recommendations?

If you look at this patent application, I don't think anything is
getting through that breather hole :-) The breather hole is only
intended for pressure equilization, when barometric pressure changes.

http://www.wipo.int/ipdl/IPDL-CIMAGE...EMENT_SET=DECL

Example of a commercial breather hole filter:
http://www.donaldson.com/en/diskdriv...ary/000610.pdf

Also, from an IBM disk manual:

"Do not cover the breather hole! Covering the
breather hole may result in loss of data."

I still don't understand why the pressure is so significant. If
you take a computer to Boulder Colorado, the air inside the HDA is
going to get thinner, so big deal ? I wonder if flexure of the
cover is the problem ?

http://www.storagereview.com/guide20...p/packAir.html

No matter how you move air over the disk, the air is a soup of
particles that are monstrous in size compared to the aperture on
the breather filter. A more dangerous situation, would be opening
a bottle of solvent next to the drive, as vapour phase is likely
to be a more effective poison than particulate (even if there is
a diffuser channel).

Wow! Thanks for all the clarification.

I built a frame that fits over three 5.25" drive bays, and the
frame holds a fan. That is how the disk drives in one of my
computers get cooled. It pulls cool air from the outside over
the drives. Another of my computers has a fan mounted in front
of one of the drive cages, which performs the same function.

Here is an example of a module for a coolermaster CMstacker case.
It consists of a fan plus HD cage. Some other cases fasten the
fan to the case, and the cage is removable.

http://www.i-tech.com.au/products/item5641.asp

Not sure how this would mount in my case.

The two enemies of the hard drive, are heat and moisture. The
allowed temperature drops with increased humidity. At 60% R.H. you
are allowed about 35C. (IBM or Hitachi disk OEM manuals have curves
for allowed environmental conditions.) Now, if I am to believe that,
then how do people in tropical countries use these drives ?

Air conditioning?

http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techl...Deskstar_7K250
"Deskstar 7K250 Specification v1.5 (Serial ATA)" - PDF pg.35
http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/17351B59F3028F4486256D3D0065D995/$file/d7k250S_sp.pdf

Thanks for your reply, Paul.

--
Regards from John Corliss

"John Corliss" wrote in message
...
My system is set up with two hard drives and I use XXCopy:

http://www.xxcopy.com/index.htm

to clone one to the other on demand. I do *not* use RAID because I want
control over when a backup copy is made. Unfortunately, I recently fried
my main hard drive and had to send it back.

Yesterday, I received the replacement hard drive from Newegg.com and have
installed it. Since I've now gone through two secondary hard drives in
what I consider to be short order, it's time to figure out why this is
happening. Kony (my thanks to you!) and somebody else (sorry, I can't find
the thread now) suggested that I look into cooling the hard drives. This
makes a lot of sense to me because they're mounted right on top of one
another, and when I touch them after running the computer for a while,
they're both rather warm - bordering on HOT.

Time to cool those puppies.

I've been looking at various fan additions and what I really want to do is
to blow directly ONTO the hard drives in order to maximize heat removal.
This, however, will blow dust onto the hard drives and as Kony mentioned,
"while a drive is sealed, most have a filtered vent hole still." This
means that dust still has a way into the drive, although it's a difficult
path. Thus, I would think that it's better to suck air away from the
drives rather than blow onto them.

Mounting a hard drive in a fan unit that fits into a spare 5.25" bay is
not an option, because I want to cool both hard drives. However, I'm
thinking of additionally adding a 5.25" bay mounted case fan in the middle
bay (I have three) to cool my two DVD drives and provide additional case
ventilation.

But back to the hard drives, I'd like to find something that will mount so
as to suck the hot air right off of the hard drives and out of the case. I
would prefer not to use something that will suck the heat off of the hard
drives and distribute it into the case, but maybe that additional fan in
the 5.25" empty bay will render that concern of no consequence. Any
recommendations?

TIA

--
Regards from John Corliss



Easiest solution (if your case allows it) is to separate the drives (put one
drive space between them) and have an intake at the front of your system
sucking air in and blowing it across them. You can easily attach a filter
(bought or home-made) to prevent dust monsters from invading. As far as the
added warm air, if you have a couple of good exhaust fans it'll make little
or no difference and in fact might even keep your case cleaner if you had
negative pressure in there before the fan was added.
--


"I don't cheat to survive. I cheat to LIVE!!"
- Alceryes

On Tue, 18 Oct 2005 13:35:41 GMT, "Alceryes"
wrote:

Easiest solution (if your case allows it) is to separate the drives (put one
drive space between them) and have an intake at the front of your system
sucking air in and blowing it across them.

That'll work but an even easier solution is to get Kingwin KF-23
removable drive bays. That model has 3 fans - and based on the MBM5
report, the drive stays cool.

Even when I beat up on it, like defrag, DVD Shrink, etc - things that
cause the CPU to heat up a lot - the drive stays cool, no higher than
45C at most. WD gives an operating range of 5 - 55C so my drives stay
well inside that range.

"John Corliss" wrote:
It still amazes me the way that my case's slide-in hard drive mounting
bracket stacks the hard drives so closely together. True stupidity on
the part of some engineer. For the time being I think I'll fabricate an
extension of some sort so that I can get some space between the two hard
drives.

Yep, using the stock hole you can really only mount one drive properly. The
trick is to remove the bracket and drill your own holes to permit two HDDs
to equally share the space too small for three. I did this to mine when I
installed a case fan on the end to blow air over them.

Jon