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Hard Drive Cooling for 10 Cents
David Tiberio writes "I've bought many hard drive cooling solutions over the years, sometimes spending $50 or more on drive cooling systems that were noisy and did little to cool down the drive. After much tinkering, I discovered a simple solution that cost me only 10 cents per drive... the 1/2 inch bracket. Mounts any 80mm fan to the belly of an internal hard drive."
Fan not included, I take it?
(first post?)
Did we really need an article on Slashdot to figure this one out? ;-)
Uhh that sounds like Microsoft costing.
MS: "We can help you serve customers for only 10c a day!"
Manager: "woohoo. Approved!"
MS: "So your bill is $36.50 for the first year, plus $899 site license, plus $299 Windows licenses for each CPU plus $1599 service contract plus...."
Who knew you could attach things to other things using a bracket and screws? Thanks again Slashdot.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Your data called.
It wants the integrity of its magnetic field back.
what about when you have several drives or a tiny case?
Pay attention. That's hard drive cooling the article mentions, not processor cooling.
Most of the noise on most computers is because of the noisy fan that cools the processor, it has nothing to do with hard drive cooling.
*This* is top-grade engineering! This could be used to cool down spacecraft re-entering earth atmosphere :|
Cool! :^D
I think you'll find in the long run that a single bracket like that isn't enough support. The metal in those brackets is cheap.
Why didn't anyone think of this before?
Oh wait... every geek in the world has done this, or something close to it. I've used all sorts of hardware store parts to mount fans inside cases as have hordes of other geeks over the decades.
Well... Most S.M.A.R.T. temperature sensors are on the PCB and they are measuring PCB temperature instead of the internal drive temperature.
Hence, a fan under the disk makes a lot of difference while making very little to make your data safer.
A 3x 40mm fan battery in front of a drive or a pressed enclosure that cools the actual package holding the platters makes a lot of difference there while not chaning the S.M.A.R.T. reading by more then a degree or so.
It is up to you - what do you want. Show (a good reading) or substance (good temperature of your drive platters and heads).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
"Anyway..."
If you decide to go with this kind of setup, try to make sure you use a fan with low vibration (well balanced, low speed). The last thing you need with a hard drive is more vibration. The drive head is only flying a few hundred molecules above the drive surface.
It may not amount to much as the vibration needs to be of the right frequency to be really bad. But it is probably better to err on the side of caution with drive lifetimes already being as bad as they are.
I personally use a 120mm fan that is mounted on rubber pegs, perpendicular to the hard drives, but not mounted to the drives themselves. This way, less vibration is transferred to the drives.
I've seen a few HD coolers. This seems to work alright.
My question is - why? I guess I've never really heard of anyone over-cloking there hd's. Do they really overheat? How can you tell? When should you worry about it?
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
... but would it not make more sense to either
1. mount a 90mm fan on the front of your 3.5 inch bays.
2. mount a 120mm fan on the front of your 5.25 inch bays.
This way you actually get airflow for 2 to 3 drives rather than blocking airflow with another damn drive.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Wouldn't it make more sense to pull the air away from the drive? You don't point your CPU fan at your CPU/Heatsink.
What?
But why not just dunk the whole drive into a air-tight container full of liquid nitrogen to cool it? Then you get good readings and guerenteed cooling!
Now Slashdot has to tell me what case designers have know for ages? Hmmm...maybe that's why my case has a fan right next to the hard drive.
Must be a slow news day...
Come on. A fan on top of the drive isn't noisy?
LETS PATENT IT!
... if you just use modern drives which run at 5400RPM? Maxtor Maxline II 300GB runs just about at the ambient temperature, with no cooling at all.
Of course, if you must have the absolute maximum performance currently available, then do what you must. The difference between 7200 and 5400 RPM may less than you would guess: above vs Maxline Plus II (250mb) is 10 vs 9 ms (transfer rate is same 133 MB/s for both).
Thought everyone did stuff like this when they wanted to keep their hardware a while..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
He could mount it in the other side, blowing at the disk cover. I would also add some rubber in the contact places (or rubber "screws"), so the vibrations of the fan do not pass to the disk. Damn, even a 120mm fan that blows that the side, if you case allows (use the PCB side holes instead of the thin side holes).
Did you see the state of that fan in the article? Smothered in dust and fluff. I'd give it another week's life before it starts making a noise. It'll only make that noise for a bit though, and then after that it'll be really, really quiet. Because it will have stopped.
If you're putting together a server that relies on running cool, dont skimp on your ${LOCAL_CURRENCY} by recycling cruddy fans from your old 486 boxes!
This is a lie. The article is clearly wrong.
"Connect all the power cables and take a sampling of your temperature sensor on your hard drive, using tools such as SMART software. You should notice a dramatic change in temperature such that other cooling methods will no longer be necessary."
I DARE YOU TO TRY IT! Your HD won't last 5 seconds without the fan you've just attached which would GASP be doing the cooling unlike a little bit of metal..
I like muppets.
I've got a fan in my PSU, over my GPU, my CPU.
It already sounds like a bloody helicopter and now you want me to spend 10cents making it even louder !
Wow !
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Run your PC for a while, then stuck your tongue on it..
HD's do run hot.. And hot reduces lifespan.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Well, after over-clocking my AMD 1800+ to the point that the BIOS thinks it's a 2200+, and installing four hard-drives, two video cards, and cool neon-lights, I ended up stripping the case covers and leaving only the metallic skeleton holding the parts together.
I then proceeded to plop two big-ass fucking fans on both sides of the box to manage the cooling. The little dinky CPU fan couldn't handle the processor, so I had to do it.
What... So I don't have enough cash to dish out for one of those fancy-mangled "water cooling systems" or "liquid nitrogen". But hell, It Just Works.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
If you care about your data and you are running 7500rpm or higher cool your harddrives or do not put them adjacent to other drives.
I had some 7500rpm western digital harddrives overheat and cause data corruption. Since I started applying fans I've had no problems.
Doesn't that risk damaging the drive/data via a magnetic field rather close to it?
one bracket does not seem sturdy enough for a fan of that size.....once the dupe comes out later today the second bracket will provide a much more durable solution.
I sat down to write a new sig tonight and all I did was make the chair warm.
Let me get this straight...
...
You're saying that bigger fans... move more air than smaller ones?
It's all just too confusing. Mind you, I'm an alien from a parallel dimension. In my world, it works like this:
Step 1: Profit!
Step 2:
Step 3: Hard drive dools down.
Step 4: Detach small fan from hard drive.
Yeah. LOL. It's not the PCB that gets hot anyway, at least not on my drives.
The heat is in the disc, the drive motor, and related surfaces. Some of them can get quite hot. I still have some (working!) giant SCSI bricks that get hot enough to burn flesh.
Full height 5.25 drives that would burn fingers and break your foot too, if you dropped it. I think it weighs close to 10 pounds. It'd probably still work after the fall but it only holds 1 gig or something. Not worth a bother.
Anyway, I cool my drives with a 120v turbine fan that blows sideways across the whole drive. The air cools the disc side and the PCB side. Works great. Doesn't tax the system PSU.
Sig for hire.
Since heat does rise, wouldnt it make more since to pull the heat off the top or blow the fan accross the drive itself. Just MO.
Let's get it patented before others do so.
can you explain why to blow air onto the HDD, instead of of blowing the air away?
I bought some HDD coolers myself, and I thought that blowing air away is better, hence I don't know why I thought that.
So what are pros and cons of blowing air in one direction or another?
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
I was mounting the fan on the OUTSIDe of the case. I was alot cooler but that damn drives kept getting hot! I was so close...
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
I used zip ties and an old slot 1 heatsync and mounted it to the top of the hard drive. so its not only a fan, the heatsync does its job too. worked great for me. but hey, what do i know, im just an Anonymous Coward
A fan mounted on a HDD as something new?! I think with the current new hard drive temperatures cooling is a law. For me there is no question about that, but to pay something extra for that is just foolish. This idea should be the first thing that comes into the mind when thinking about hdd cooling. Not really something new and original. I'we done this already as soon as i got my new and hot harddrive.
I find this sort of cooler much more useful:z m2hc2
http://www.quietpc.com/uk/harddrive.php#
The heatpipes per se only make a small difference to the temperature (perhaps 6-10 degrees?), but the rubber mounts do a fabulous job of reducing the noise.
This is obviously just a ploy to make some money. The guy has an affiliate link to PCMALL. He is hoping some people click and buy some other stuff along with the screw. Can we get back to real news?
it is finally safe to overclock my drives with this device? 16,000 here I come!
Not for server grade systems. You get quite a lot of noise from the case fans, not just the CPU fan, and you do notice a noise difference when you go to larger, more expensive fans that can move the air more quietly.
For what it's worth, try holding your hand in the airflow of a fan some time. It feels a lot stronger on the side the fan blows on to compared to the one the fan sucks the air from. Obviously, the same amount of air has to be blown out as sucked in, but blewn out air is accelerated in a certain direction giving it more power. It's not that much of a difference, anyway - people who experiment with switching on their CPU heatsink/fan typically end up with only a few degrees of temperature difference. Most modern tower cases have one or two intake fans in the front blowing on to the hard drives.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Sure.
Do you have a fan handy? Any sort of window fan or table fan will do, or even one of those 80mm computer fans.
Power it up and aim the air at your face. You should feel a cooling effect, maybe even a lot of cooling if it's a strong fan. Move the fan away a little. Distance decreases the effect but it's probably still noticable, right?
Now turn the fan around. No effect at all at a distance. Move it closer. Still nothing. You're going to have to put your face right up next to the fan to feel anything and even then, it won't be very strong compared to the air coming out the other side.
Bigger fans do have more of a suction effect and it also depends on the design. Vacuum cleaners obviously have quite a bit of intake power, but they also have substantial blower exhaust output.
And what of CPU fans? CPU fans can get away with suction because they are sitting right on top of the heatsink. But, I have to say I have never owned such a CPU cooler. All of mine have blown air down upon the heatsink.
Sig for hire.
I just use tape. It is more versatile.
really bored? My blog
1. Running 2 drives as RAID-1 with a spare souunds less efficient than just running RAID-1 for the OS partition and RAID-5 for the data. RAID-5 is faster for writes than RAID-1, but RAID-1 offers protection for the boot OS
2. One fan per drive seems inefficient, and it will increase the power consumption of the box as a whole - not including the wasted space.
3. Mounting a large fan with one single bracket would make the fam vibrate and not be mounted in a sturdy fashion
4. The title doesn't include the cost of the fans. If he has three drives, three fans, three brackets, we're looking at about $20
5. All these extra fans brings us back to the age of the noisy PC. So passé.
My suggestion? A good Antec case with proper ventilation holes at the front and a 120mm fan at the rear. If you have three or more drives, add an 80mm fan at the front, blowing air on the drives in the same direction the air is pulled in from the 120mm. It's not the low temp of the drives that matters, it's air circulation + consistent temp.
I'm sure some "people have a right to profit" dude will mod me down.
/.?
There are Ferengi on
hows this for unqualified speculation?
you cool things by exposing them to large quantities of colder air. This is subtly different than moving hot air away.
blowing towards allows you to direct high speed air to a precise location. i.e. the air coming out of the fan is mostly going in the same direction, straight out of the fan.
when you suck, you're basically creating a low pressure zone which gets filled in from all directions.
so the air flow going into a fan is coming from many different angles and is therefore kind of spread out and not as intense.
this is why all the cpu fans and gpu fans (i've seen) blow air onto the heatsink instead of sucking it away from the heatsink.
if you blow onto the heatsink you guarantee that a larger portion of your airflow contacts the heatsink. if you suck away from the heatsink you are wasting airflow on the air that gets sucked from places further from the heatsink.
sucking still works though & in certain physical configurations its your only option.
no suck & blow jokes please!
Quoting the article: "Please note that in some cases I suspected that the drive temperature was not being reported properly, as some drives showed no change in temperature via software but were clearly cooler to the touch." I assume he touched the metal around the actual platters and not the (powered) drive electronics. I doubt a 3x 40 mm fan battery will be more effective than this, in fact it'd probably be more noisy at the same amount of airflow/cooling. It's not like his setup only cooled the PCB.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
"The bracket will do nothing by itself! You need a fan!"
I think Captain Obvious had a seizure.
I used 1/2-inch deep holes, and the drive wouldn't even fire up when I tried to boot. It turned out that the drive had really flimsy construction, and they had moving parts right under the surface that were immobilized by the screws. The cheap POS wouldn't even work after I took the screws back out.
If you plan to do this, I'd recommend using very short screws; probably no more than 1/8-inch.
so your computer is too hot? good, put in some ... after a few months ... but then ...
fans. nice. now you never have to bother that it
gets too hot. oh, but wait
you get those old (hot) temperature readings back.
you look inside but all fans are running.
RUNNING IN FILTH! instead of trying to make your
filthy computer cool by installing dust
attracting fans that will peep-poppy powder your
equipment under some really nicely isolating dust.
maybe you should get of your sorry a$$ and
freaking CLEAN it once in a while
again you're prolly one of those dudes that smell
like little babies at the meating 'cause you
wouldn't spend enough time wipeing your ass off
correctly
(this is not a flame against the nice mister
inventor with a good idea (serious) but to those
other lamers with the "fans are the solution"
mentality)
Just pull all the hard disks out of the cage, and set a 80mm fan in there. The typical 3-drive cage will hold a 80x25mm fan up in front of the drives. Just set it in there with the label pointed into the case, and put the drives back in. The fan isn't going to catch on anything if there's no grill, but you can put on there if you so desire. Plug it in, and instant Raid-0 drive saver.
It surprising how much more reliable drives are, these days, when you just have a cheap fan blowing across them.
You can also buy those 5.25" drive cages that will hold 3-drives in two 5.25" spaces, and come with a 80mm fan up front.
what a genius, don't you agree?
Standard commercial systems only cool by 1-5 C.
He's able to achieve at 10-15 C temperature reduction.
Personally, I'd expect a 5 C drop; the 10-15 C drop is significant and not obvious. So significant that I'm considering doing this myself now. Personally, I find this large of a drop surprising. And yes, I do a lot of hardware hacking and know a good bit about cooling (you DO know what theta is, don't you?).
If one is going to claim that this is obvious, could you please post some references? Personally, I think such a complaint sounds like sour grapes, with all due respect.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
I did this about a decade ago when Newtek first started shipping the Video Flyer and I had to come up with a cooling solution to keep large 9G drives cool.
On the other hand, intrigued by the complexity, or by the lack of any readability, I ventured in to the mind of Turn-X Alphonse to figure him out.. Maybe I have actually come across a new age Zen..and I found this snippet in his livejournal that confirmed my suspicions..
But it does appear Rey will be getting Impulse, Shinn will get Destiny and Lunamaria will get her own Gundam which looks like a mark 2 Gaia. Of course right now this is all guessing because we've only seen this mysterious Gundam in the new ending but it's pictured with the Minerva crew and we already know the other 3 pilots mecha. So unless Sting defects (some rumours say so) or Steallar stays on the Minerva (Doubtful, although she needs to go nuts and be really cute about it more often), it's Lunamarias.
Err..what??
Rapid Nirvana
Instead of just arranging the components in a way that doesn't let excess heat build up, we're making the system use even more power to push air around in an enclosed space. This is not how you make a more efficient system. If your hard drive is that hot, you're using the wrong chassis. Get one designed with airflow in mind. Put a heat sink on the hot components, or, better yet, figure out why they're turning so much of the power they draw into heat instead of something useful. Recycle your old chassis. No wonder the West is in a war for oil.
All you need is the blade from an old fan, a toothpick, and a 2mm drill.
1. Drill a hole in the drive directly above the platters
2. With some superglue on the end of the toothpick, insert it in the hole so that it sticks to the spindle
3. Glue the blade to the other end of the toothpick.
Now you see, no need for a fan. As long as your drive's running, the fan blade you just installed will be spinning at 5400 (or whatever rpm) your drive is.
Much cheaper than $0.10.
I've done this to one of my drives, and I blow on the PCB. Why? Because when you think about what typically fails on a HDD, it's the controller. Keep the electronics cool, the drive will last longer.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
I used a bracket just like that, except it was from an old Erector set, to cool the video card in my old computer.
This is bulshit!!! This solution only cools down the PCB (that's where the sensor is located)... not the drive as a whole... The rest of the drive might even not get cooler with even 1C degree.
It's like saying I can achieve a bigger speed for a car that the one supplied by his engine / tuning by throwing it from the top of the cliff.
Air-tight and full of liquid nitrogen? That would be quite a cool explosion...
and gluing them on with superglue and thermal
grease?
Or finding a scrap piece of metal in the garbage
or on the street and making a heatsink?
I know some old microwaves would help cooling in
a cinch, but would they compromise the magnetic
field too?
except the heat isn't on the PCB side...
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
better to put the fan on the side. then you can use one fan to cool more than one drive.
I have a 80mm fan right now cooling 4 ide drives and it brings the temps down about 10-15 degrees C. They run about 35-37 degrees C as opposed to almost 50 degrees C without it.
pretty basic hack really. I don't see the point in making a WHOLE slashdot article about it. Maybe someone out there just went, "Hey, what a GREAT idea." but I bet that person already tried to dunk their drives in ice water.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
A few readers have pointed out that the magnetic field from an 80mm fan is probably nowhere near strong enough to penetrate the metal platter cover, let alone affect the bits on the platters themselves. Then one reader mentioned that if the fan was mounted on the underside, it would have to go throught the PCB as well. Can a fan motor induce enough current in the PCB traces to cause data errors (or CRC-type errors and thereby slow down data transfer)? What about all those fancy-but-cheap (look, it's UV reactive!) unshielded round cables that no longer have a ground next to each data line? I wonder if that might be one more reason not to have 12 fans in one case, but have not seen the issue addressed...
An MIT prof just released a new book that you can read online called Democratizing Innovation. I haven't read the whole thing yet but it looks like he may be on to something. Also see Pro-Am Revolution .
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
If only hard drives actually needed cooling. Sure, those 10000+ rpm raid 5 scsi dealies might, but those are in servers in super air conditioned rooms and crap. The 3 normal (S)ATA discs in my pc don't need no fan. And because that's just what i want to do is waste some space in my case with some ghetto fan making more noise.
I hate when people make you download a 972x914 pixel, 129703-byte image, then hit it with width=400 height=376 attributes in the tag. Reducing the image itself would have reduced the size by about 2/3rds.
Grrrr!
You bunch of southern shandy drinking toss pots - Real men don't use fans. I fry (broil to you yanks) eggs on my hard drive and they taste darn good!
HD's dont need cooling. I've never cooled my HD's and not ever had a HD problem in 20+ years I've had a computer.
This cooling fad is just another way of companies selling you expensive crap you don't technically need (such as fans with leds).
The author is probably one of those people who pay 200 bucks for gold speaker cables too.
Honestly the $0.10 bracket is so 2004.
Imagine spending a whole dime!!!! How absurd and wasteful. I accomplished the same thing for -$0.01 using the following components:
1. Large piece of duct tape (appx value $0.04)
2. Used piece of bubble gum from under desk. (FREE)
3. Piece of string I found on floor (FREE)
4. Bailing wire procured from neighbors fence (FREE)
5. Plus I found nickel in my couch cushion while doing this project. Whoop! (value -$0.05)
If anybody is interested I'll writeup an article detailing how it works and post pictures.
I'm thinking about forming a corporation to sell kits for $0.01 -- (nickel included). I bet I could do a 2x or 3x markup and sell it for -$0.03.
Phase one: we collect underpants.
Phase two: ???
Phase three: profit!
Of course it will work -- You don't know much about corporations do you? Us gnomes are geniuses at corporations.
Kenshin (43036)
heavy snowfall (847023)
Look real close at the IDs guys...
43036 < 847023
so
Kenshin > heavy snowfall
so
!Troll
On my drive (Western Digital 80Gb, 2MB cache) the PCB gets very hot, even when the drive is running idle. I discovered that accidentaly - I've always been checking the metal case temperature before.
This is also the case with Western Digital 40GB drives (the same series, but with 8MB cache) in a machine at work.
Of course when I found this out, I immediately obtained and installed proper hard drive coolers and fans.
I have been lead to understand that drives don't typically fail because their platters got hot. They tend to fail because their circuit boards fail. You'll find advice all over the internet suggesting that you try to fix a broken drive by swapping the circuit board from another of the same model before purchasing expensive data reclamation.
In that context, this fellow's solution doesn't seem so irrelevant. Keeping the circuit board cool is likely to lengthen the life of the drive.
The massive temperature decrease with the current setup is because he's cooling the temperature sensor, without cooling the components that the sensor is supposed to be measuring for -- thus producing a false reading.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
...hook up a spray mister as well to increase your cooling capacity!
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Wow, glad to see he found a really old fan full of dust and crap to blow into his harddrive.
Let us now how long it lasts will you?
This brings up a related subject, namely, putting a filter in front of the fan to filter out dust. Antec rackmount cases have a great solution, namely a removeable tray in front of the fan. The tray comes with a spongy filter type of material which is anti-static.
I've tried finding a raw source for this material, with no luck. Does anyone know where one might find this?
Basically I'd like to get a large sheet of this, and cut it up appropriately for all of the various fans that I have. I'd really like to reduce the dust in my systems.
If anyone knows of a source for the raw anti-static material in large quantities, I'd appreciate knowing it. Thanks in advance.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
Or at least according to this article. My Lian Li case happens to have two intake fans blowing on the same place where the hard disks are mounted.
Of course that's only if you don't count the more than $100 the case cost. Can't say I regret it though.
Perhaps I missed something. First the author says that previous systems were noisy, then he happily mounts a fan (and to make things worse, from a heat-removing airflow POV he points it at the PCB of the drive - the part that the least needs extra air-flow for cooling.
Too bad there is no link to "Buy Slashdot a brain" - it is needed before buying books.
You just killed an entire industry with your $0.10 solution!
Go to a place called Abova All they have been buying all the heat sinks they could find for like 30 years and they still have huge crates full. They have industrial illuminum heat sinks too big to mount on your car!
And they have tonnes of little ones, buy like $2 worth of aluminum heatsinks and get some thermal adhesive (available most hardware stores) you're done.
Wow that is cool i had been thinking lately of how to zip tie some cool LED fans to the amp in my car. Got to love the hardware store
http://www.DaveNet.biz/
I've been doing this for ages, but even cheaper!
http://www.electrichamster.net/fans.jpg
"Who knew you could attach things to other things using a bracket and screws? Thanks again Slashdot."
So that's how geeks have sex!?
Gee, I did this to cool a 30 Meg Seagate in an XT box back in the 80's. The drive wouldn't work without it. I've used the trick in many PC cases since then. You must get a well balanced fan or it will shake loose over time an it does concentrate the dust on the drive.
Seems to me like this method would mostly cool the circuitboard, whereas the part that gets hot is the metal housing (or rather: what's inside).
What's the difference in the longetivity of a hard drive because of adding a cooling solution? I've got SGI machines more than 8yrs old, that have been running virtually 24/7 nonstop, and still have their original scsi hard drives. These machines are beasts with dual power supplies (sometimes up to 1000W).
How long has this cooling craze been going on? Seems like it just started a few years ago. People have become so bored that they mod just about anything nowadays. It's more like a competition to see who can get the most fans into their $50.00 acrylic see-thru case.
You know, even $35,000 UNIX workstations don't have "disk coolers". They just mount the drives with air space all around them (about 1/2 inch top and bottom) and allow the regular case fan to do all the cooling work. This is adequate even for super-fast 10KRPM and 15KRPM SCSI drives.
The super-expensive RAID arrays do the same. They just allow space around the drives and have regular fans pull air through the case.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Here's what I did when facing a similar situation : get the heat out of the case.
Bay Fan
Note that that's just the first Google hit I found for case fan exhaust twin bay 5.25 - the picture is what I am talking about, I don't know anything about the company.
All the hot air goes to the top of the case, this fan has twin horizontally mounted fans blowing air out the front of the case. It dropped the case temperature quite a bit, enough that my system went from 'generally unstable' to rock solid. The nice thing about it is that it uses ducted fans without obstructions, they seemed to be very effective in getting the air to go how I wanted it to go and not just swirling around.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
but it works VERY well. i've been doing this for a long time. I have one processor fan (like a slim athlon fan) per hard drive, blowing on the circuit board. the hard drives are 36G 10k scsi drives, which get very hot by themselves.
:-)
it is sufficient to cool the circuit board - the rest of the hard drive will stay fairly cool as well. It seems like the chips on the circuit board produce more heat than the plates.
i gotta admit, I never used the brackets, I've just been hanging the fans with zip-ties
--- sig moved for great justice.
like the Entec case I have, the cage where the floppy and two drives mount.
I had an old 4G scsi there and an 8G deskstar, when things got going, or just sat there those disks would get so hot the drives would stop, or make the "click of death". Scary.
Scorched my finger touching it, and the "how to fix" was really simple:
Pushed out the bay cover under the floppy, glued in place (intake), strung a fan using thick plastic coated twist ties (son's toys from Xmas) over the front side of the two drives and a 4mm x 40mm fan that was 7Volted (oppose 12V and 5V rail).
It is not loud, but the cooling is great (no more burned digits).
Even when the fan gets squeaky, take it out, peel back the sticker over the bearing and dip a straightened papercliip into regular engine oil and one or two drops is usually good for a year or so. If the sticker does not re-apply, just use regular tape (just in case the oil drips, don't want it slinging around inside the case).
Even revived an old TNT2 fan that had seized after years of use.
Yeah, I scoffed at first at TFA, but *I* didn't think of it. I just did the same thing I described above with an 80mm fan in the 5 1/4" bay.
(Yeah, Ghetto as hell looking case, but unless the house gets up to 120F inside...everything will be at a decent operating temp)
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
You never know around these parts, but I assume you are being funny. If so, I did find it funny, although I would have found it funnier if I wasn't a little worried you weren't being serious! (On the off chance that you are being serious, read here - from the library of congress, although you can find similar material in many other well respected websites - about how the Coriolis effect does not determine the direction the water swirls in the drain.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
From personal experience I can tell you that drives can sometime get unreliable while hot, but be OK once cooled again. I have some drives in cheap removable trays -- the trays have their own fan and sometimes these fans fail.
I recently dealt with a case where one tray fan failed and the drive got hot enough to discolor the plastic tray, and cause all kinds of errors from the drive; yet, once the tray is replaced, the drives now seem to work -- mostly.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Big Mistake in the article: Use only nylon straps as brackets. A metal strap conducts the fan vibration to the hard drive.
Ahh, you young whippersnappers (and yes, I'm 30).
I remember such overheating problems with the old Commodore 64's 1541 drive that I had a flat, 6 inch diameter house "big clip on" style fan that I simply placed face down over the cooling holes at the rear (as you can see in the picture).
It was the only thing that could keep the drive cool enough for extended sessions of Mail Order Monsters. Otherwise the drive would go out of alignment *again* and it was time to go crying to Dad to get it fixed at the repair shop.
What of the noise? He's attaching a fan to the hard drive with metal parts, and it looks like his hard drive is attached to the case without any noise-reducing apparatus. It's sure to add yet another irritating drone to the system.
After making a low-noise PC, (3 quiet fans, runs very cool) I can't imagine putting an extra fan in for something that a bit of improved airflow design could alleviate.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Yeah, this really isn't the right way to mount a fan. Hard drive specs (which nobody gets, but whatever) say that you should have air moving across the drive, as though it is a column in a tube or something, not straight at one of the big faces. This is definitely not the recommended practice, since the air doesn't really have anywhere to go.
I really like the Apple G5 design where they had somewhere around 8 fans, yet the system was super-quiet because they were all big and ran at a low speed. There were no CPU fans per se, though the heatsinks were pretty monster. The airflow was obvious -- straight through the machine.
Anyway, PC cases induce nightmares when thinking about airflow. I wish they were as simple as the Apple design.
Another thing: I got scared a while back when I had to move my computer into a new case. I neglected to put in a fan in the mounting bracket in front of my hard drives, and they got to be very toasty. Simply adding an 80mm fan to the place where it was supposed to go helped a lot.
I've had a number of drives fail in the past few years in my home computer, until I installed removable harddrive trays. I haven't had any drive failures since.
p roduct_code=50261146&pfp=SEARCH
The ones I use have a front and rear fan built in.
They also have the added convenience of making it easy to swap drive.
Downside is they require a front accessible 5.25 drive bay.
This is a similar tray: http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?
Seems like a big waste of space to me. If you have enough free drive bays for this to work, chances are you don't need seperate HD cooling.
I've got 11 drives in my system currently, there is plainly just not enough space for this to work. Think I'm sticking with the 10$ box fan blowing through the side of my case.
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What an unabashed load of crap. The top of the page has a big banner ad to PC Mall. The bottom of the page says "You can buy fans at PC Mall" with the PC Mall being a clickable link. Slashdot submission review editors can really be gullible fools sometimes.
Mounting the fan this way would help, but it seems difficult to scale up to multiple drives. On my home system, I have two hard drives in large CD-ROM bays and want to mount one low speed fan that blows air past the drives from the front of the case to the back.
I've jerry-rigged this already with some tape. The CPU temperature dropped by 20F, and the hard drive's temperature dropped to room temperature + 5F. (I also opened up the front of the case which probably helped a lot...)
The problem is that the installation looks terrible, and is noisy, since the fan is exposed to the outside of the case. Also, I don't really trust the tape to hold up over time.
I would like to do something that is more permanent and that is completely internal.
Hard drives have screw holes on the bottom that can be used for mounting, but these holes aren't used by the hard drive brackets that I have.
Perhaps one of them could be used to mount an 80mm fan like this, entirely inside of the case. (Some other case fan would be needed to provide fresh air, but this would make sure that the drives had air-flow.)
Here's the tricky part. I've drawn the fan so that it is flush with the cd-rom and the top of the case. It turns out that standard 80mm fans actually do take up all of the space. So, what type of commonly available, cheap mounting bracket will connect one of the screw holes on the bottom of the drive to the mounting hole on the fan? I think the best way to go is to pick something that will bend, and then use 2-4 of them to keep the fan from moving. Any ideas?
I say go 4 brackets instead, whut the heck (if yoiu can make the hole line up with the correct size brackets). Still got the side screw holes for mounting.
Or, go whole hawg but cheaper, just make your own brackets with your own drill and some scrap flat plate.
anyway, simple nice hack.
AFAIK, one uses spares with RAID 5 or similar solutions. When using RAID 5, one would have a spare to take over if an active drive goes down -- if it was active before it would expand the size of the array and would have data on its own on it, and thus couldn't take over for another drive.
I realize that RAID 1 with a spare may yield slightly better nominal write performance if in a software RAID array. OTOH, three drives would also yield better nominal read performance than just 2 drives and a spare. And, it wouldn't matter at all with hardware accelerated RAID.
So my point is: Is it just me, or is this guy going all wrong about his RAID? I just want to verify my thoughts, if someone would spar with me.
The other replies to your question are good.
... but then he went on...)
But there's more to the answer than they realize.
Let me start with a story...
At my first job about 10 years ago, I wound up helping out at the IT department of a cellular phone company (no, a real cell phone manufacturer, not a service provider). One of the first tasks I had was to replace the CPU cooling fans on a few Sun desktop workstations. At the time, these Sun systems were incredibly expensive - about $40K each if I remember correctly. That, coupled with the fact that this was my first job, made me really nervous. I'd had a little experience with computer cooling fans before, but more with just general electronics. So when I pulled the case off the first system and removed the old, dead CPU cooling fan, I focused 100% on making sure that I matched the polarity of the wires on new cooler with what the old cooler had been using.
And in being so nervous, and so focused on the polarity, I completely missed the obvious question: does the CPU cooling fan pull air upward, or does it blow air downwards? I just stood there next to the system, yelling at myself in my mind for having failed to take notice of the airflow direction.
Now today of course, I've had more experience than I could possibly want with cooling fans. But remember, back then in the early 1990's, A) I was young, and B) CPU cooling fans weren't so common.
Anyway, I immediately realized my problem. But not wanting to let on to the guy who worked in that cube that I wasn't sure how to reinstall the CPU cooling fan inside his $40K system, I thought about it and decided that it would be most efficient if the CPU cooler wasn't fighting the natural tendency of heat to rise. And given that the cooler included a channeled heat-sink, it seemed reasonable that a fan extracting air upwards would work best oriented that way. And hey, power supply fans exhaust heated air from the supply, not force air it into the supply, right? So I installed the fan facing upwards, put the cover back on the system, and moved on.
Imagine my surprise (and fear) when I arrived at the next system with a dead fan, and I realized that the fan was facing downwards. I was now sweating, as I was worried that the CPU in the first system was at risk of frying. That concern was further heightened as all the subsequent CPU cooling fans were also mounted pointing down. Needless to say, except for that first system, I mounted all the other CPU fans facing downwards.
But this still perplexed me. Why would the cooling fan be blowing downwards, fighting the natural tendency of heat to rise? (These were desktop systems -- the CPU wasn't going to wind up sideways or upside-down -- so the potential for changes in orientation didn't occur to me.) At that inexperienced age, and back then when CPU cooling fans were so rare that I'd had no experience with them before, this really baffled me. So much so that, later in the day when I was trying to resolve a computer problem for someone in the RF department, I actually spontaneously launched into the story about what had happened earlier in the day, and asked the guy working in the cube if he, as an EE, could shed any light on the situation. He laughed at the story. As did the guy from a neighboring cube who'd stopped by to chat. But the magic thing was, he actually had an answer.
Not only that, it was a really good answer.
I'm paraphrasing, but here's what he said, roughly:
"Well, you're right. If you mount the fan blowing upwards, you're not fighting the natural tendency of heat to rise, and given the channeling effect of the heat-sink, the fan is going to have a cooling effect."
(Ok, good so far
"But you're forgetting the fan itself in this situation! If you mount the fan facing upwards, then it will actually be pulling the heated air through itself. The fan itself will actually heat up as a result of that, and the bearings aren't going t
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
And after having to spend several nights sleeping on the floor of my Server Room, you are dead on right!
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
I currently have a fan mounted at an angle under my drive bays. I just used small nylon "zip ties" to attatch it to some unused screw holes in my case. Might have cost more than 10 cents... but not much more, and I didn't have to buy the screws either. Plumbers Epoxy putty is another thing I use for stuff like this sometimes, just make sure you wrap it around the stuff you are holding because it doesn't stick to some materials.
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
I seem to recall an episode of Mythbusters where they tried to find out just how much of a magnetic field it took to do damage to things like floppy disks. To actually affect data, I think they had to resort to neodymium magnets that would about crush your fingers if you got them in between a pair of the magnets. And I think they had to rub them directly on the disks. That's my recollection anyway; I wasn't paying close attention to the TV at the time.
This is a great idea if all you needed to do was cool the circuit board. The fans don't effectively cool the platters, though, and sometimes that thermistor that tells you the temperature is mounted on the same side as the circuit board, getting cooled by that fan, and showing you lower temperatures, but the platters are still running hot.
Kriston
I must thank you for sharing very interesting experience from you life. Thanks :))
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
I've used double-sided sticky foam tape to attach 40mm fans to hard drives before. The foam tape can be stacked a few layers high to provide room for air to flow away as it is pushed down against the drive.
Considering the length of a roll of this stuff and the number of fans you can mount in the fashion I have done, it's probably cheaper per fan than those 10cent brackets are.
And I've never had any problems with magnetic field interference with data on the disk. Everything has worked great, and I've been doing this for at least 10 years.
I also remember the 1541 drives. I actually had no top on mine because it often would go out of alignment and if you had the patience to mess with the alignment screws you could get lucky and put her back into alignment.
All that solved by the 1581 3.5 inch drive and later the 10 meg external hard drive that was quite literally twice the size of the 1541.
But I could save everything you ever needed to save ever on it!
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
"Full height 5.25 drives that would burn fingers and break your foot too, if you dropped it. I think it weighs close to 10 pounds. It'd probably still work after the fall"
And the armature magnets will be powerful enough to lift a car. Neat!
Seriously, if any of these drives die, salvage the magnets, but be careful with them or you *will* lose a finger.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I have never met anyone that expressed a need to specifically add cooling to their hard disk in the first place. Hard disks come factory sealed and if one is overheating it is defective or absorbing heat generated from other sources, like maybe a hot CPU. Cool the CPU.
Or is he overclocking his disk from 7k rpm to 14krpm somehow? Don't get too close to that machine.
Is this guy selling a solution to a frictional problem or a fictional problem? Shheeeez.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
With the plethora of lame ass, basically advertising posts Slashdot is putting on the front page, I can only assume editors are now getting kickbacks for these pathetic "stories".
The one concern about the airfilter material is that they usually work using static electricity to trap the particles. I'm a little hesitant to use this so close to computer equipment. The Antec filters are specifically anti-static material. The other nice thing about them is that they are washable, so you don't have to buy a whole new set every three months.
This is why I was looking for the anti-static foam. I may give the airfilters a limited try though, if I can't find any anti-static foam filters.
As far as ForestGrump's suggestion that I'm bordering on paranoid, no, not at all. You should see dust I'm dealing with. The Antec filters get absolutely caked beyond belief if they aren't cleaned frequently. And unprotected boxes get filled with dust after a year. So much so that blowing out the dust with a compressed can of air is a major undertaking.
I've already had one hard disk fail, and it was most likely due to dust. If you don't have to live with this situation, count your blessings.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
For a 3 SCSI hard drive server, the cost would be more than 10 cents per bracket. I would also need to buy several fans. It is still a great idea, my only concerns are that the vibration of the poorly mounted fan could make noise and possibly have an effect on the drives lifetime. Also, it takes up a lot of space, unless the fanned drive is in the bottom bracket of your hard drive tray, it might take up the whole tray.
Here was I thinkling there'd be no more of this blatant kick-back crap when they fired Michael. :-(
haha! i would do similar stuff to my setup when i'm feeling cheap and don't really care how my setup looked like. i had a similar setup, but instead of paying 10c for a piece of metal, i was going through my trash and found 2 cassette cases. i taped them on opposite side of the fan and duct tape it to the bottom of my case underneath my hdd, essentially, doing the same thing you did.
i do have to say though, the config you have now either would only work for the hdd on the bottom of the bays or would be wasting a lot of space. i personally like a design many new cases have been incorporting where they have the hdds line up vertically instead of flat. so you can have 4 hdds lined up side by side from left to right. then in front of those hdds there's 2 openings for 2 80mm fans which i've gotta say has cooled my 4 western digital hdds quite a bit.
HD Trailers
I have mounted a fan at the front of my case right in front of three drives. For those with cases that have front fans right in front of their hard drives, they already get this improvement. My case lacked a front fan mount, so I made one. But lots of people have cases with front fans in front of hard drives. This kind of improvement I'm sure has been done by many people. Nothing new, except using an L bracket rather than mounting the fan in the front of the case. I guess this is a solution for those with cases that lack front fan mounts.
I'm betting he discharged some sort of conductive fluid. I suspect this when the drill said "is that a PDA in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?" Where he inserted the drill I don't wan't to imagine.
I wouldn't be quite comfortable with a fan sucking air up from the base of my case and throwing it at my HDD - despite best efforts with filtration and positive-pressure, etc, the floor of my case still carries dust, and that is not something I want in my HDD's.
I know that the spindle, etc is sealed and thus not really at issue, but if there is one board on your PC that you really don't want to fail, it's the little one that controls your hard drive.. Pretty much every other part of a PC is trivially swappable, but replacing the controller board in a hard drive is a pain in the arse.
And if you're using a hot-swappable RAID system, then your box is probably well-enough-made to not have to worry about this kind of thing.. Or the aircon in your server room should make HDD temperature a non-issue.
Domestic users should take this one with a pinch of salt..
If only slashcode supported moderating articles, and not just responses, we might increase the calibre of 'news'.
Slashdotting any site is just plain fun, but who wants to hit an advertising page?
I don't know about others, but I always try to RTFM before reading the comments, meaning others' warnings about the site not being all it seems is wasted....
you can by that foam at Hobby Lobby, or any arts and crafts store.You can also get it at hardware stores.You can also get aluminium mesh filter material at hardware stores, the stuff that they use on the fan-hood combo that's used above kitchen stoves in most apartments, really cheap.
So don't mount the fan to the hard drive, mount it to the drive cage using the same 1/2 inch L-brackets. If you get noise and/or vibration, add rubber grommets.
This has the following significant advantages:
1. The fan vibration is only minimally transmitted to the drive, if at all (aside from the air stream).
2. You don't have to worry about plugging and unplugging a second device every time you pull a drive. This also means that once you install the fan, you can neatly tuck away its wiring since it's not going anywhere.
3. You can easily put a fan above AND below a particularly hot or worrisome drive.
4. Most drive cages don't have enough extra clearance to account for the thickness of the L brackets if they're attached to the drive. This neatly sidesteps the issue.
Sure this would then just become another ghetto-rigged case fan, but do you care THAT much? If you do, then you're the type who probably wants a full enclosure for each drive anyhow (so buy one).
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
This blasphemy!
You do realize you run the risk of voiding your warranty, blowing up your house and creating a tachyon distortion field the size of manhattan!
NOOOOOO you're supposed to buy the expensive Antec case with the ready-made fan-mount across your hard drive rack. Any other usage is terrorism!
Yelling aside, why do we need the internet to tell us how to do such trivial things as screwing a bracket to a fan ? Have we become that stupid ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Patent this idea and get rich selling licenses!
Not only should the fan be mounted to draw air away from the drive to avoid depositing tribolelectrically charged dust particles on the pc board, cooling the case won't going to do much to cool the internals on most drives. That why the author saw no temp difference on some drives even though the cases felt cooler.
This is useless when you can't spare that space. I have 5 drives in a Lian-Li PC60 case. Filled to capacity.
I think I'll stick with my dust-free $50 Koolance solution....
very good, you catch on quickly. ;-)
Yes, yes, of course I do. but the question here is, how do you think I got played, fore I see it as someone else got played. And if this is in reference to my comment about what a waterhead is, well, not everyone knows that one. just trying to be helpfull since apparently schools no longer educate people :P
true that it is possible that it is flat out not known by someone just out of school, but one would think the fine tradition of learning jack-and-the-beanstalk-giant's-pimple-sized amounts of slang and insults that waterhead would come up at least once or twice. as to your first question, i was simply tired, and the thread seemed to me to be of a humorous type with interesting wordplay, somewhat along the lines of "what? i said.. what??? I SAID!... WHAT?! I FUCKING SAID!!!!!!!!" and it's ilk of games.
and I am still aiming my comments towards the person who thinks fans don't need motors...not towards you, tis obvious you have at least some education, and I would go as far as to say your grammar is good, which in this day and age is a fracking god send! If you know what I mean? So anyhow...
anyhow.... Anyone else up for hamster fans?
It is up to you - what do you want. Show (a good reading) or substance (good temperature of your drive platters and heads).
Well, when the electronics go, the data is gone as well (for most users).
Some drives have "fragile" electronics. Simply because it gets pretty hot, and cooling wouldn't be bad.
---the vacuum way---
... I came home - the fan was hot as hell, it knocked before I left, the harddrive was fried too (one of those older 5"-size-scsi-hardrives)...
Hard Drive Cooling for 10 cent (you must have a vacuum cleaner):
I have purchased almost every hard drive cooling device on the market, some costing as much as $50 or more. I have systems that place fans in front of the drive that suck air from the outside, and fans that mount underneath. The problem with these setups are that they tend to be expensive, the airflow tends to be quite low, and in general they just don't cool down the drives by more than 1 - 5 degrees. I even own one that claims an 80cfm airflow. But alas I was never satisfied with any of these cooling methods.
For over a year now I have been able to achieve a 20 - 30 degree Celsius temperature drop on my hard drives simply by using a 10 cent roll of tape from a local hardware store.
- 10 cent ducttape bracket
- vacuum cleaner (the higher the power, the better the cooling!)
- 3.5" hard drive (duh)
-warmth on bearings-
To be serious, I've been there, done that, and it graciously destroyed my harddrive when the fan was failing
-vibration alert-
It's better to use plastic or nylon strips instead of metal because the vibrations of the fan; Next to that the case will also take the vibrations and probably make lots more noise than in normal conditions.
-ventilator tips-
I am using such ventilators to cool my server rack, I got 6 mounted in them, together with a temperature meter which is built in the rack.
The best tip you can have is to use fans of decent quality. Get the ones out of metal, because they give a extra cooling effect. Don't get the cheap (plastic) ones. Best is with ball-bearing, which is quieter than a normal sleeve-bearing.
-still my best solution, the direct cooling way-
8 years ago I found it it's best to use a plate under the harddrive with 4 smaller fans that blow the intake to the plate instead of suck it away - eventually put a heatsink on the harddrive and put it on with warm guiding glue/pasta and a few screws. The heatsink must be mounted on the harddrive and the fans can be mounted on the heatsink. Let it blow ON the heatsink!
I use this method in my NAS disk (Longshine LCS8210 - which runs ucLinux) and the harddrive is cool and steady. I used this same solution in my servers and it got very steady results. Currently they are running at 35-40 degrees continuesly.
-serverrack cooling with fans-
The serverrack is standing in a seperate small room, which is in the winter and night 35-40 degrees celcius continuesly. The rack itself inside is mostly 30-35. The harddrives are cooled with an extra block on top and it works perfectly, the heat is reduced and gets sucked blown on by the 6 other system fans blowing towards the hard drives.
-cooling of the room-
The room has 2 fans on top for the summer for extracting the air and 2 fans on bottom in the summer to blow in fresh air. This directly from a air-duct. It sucks in dust as freak, so I am still trying to find better solutions on that which still gives the best airflow but least dust...
The coolers give me 5 degrees celcius reduction, which is good. Everything stays steady and whenever it gets too hot inthere, like 45-50 degrees I put on a spare fan which takes it down 5 degrees atleast. The servers have enough cooling in them together with the rack anyways; it's just the room that gets the heat extracted out of the rack.
-real extractor-
I still got a real air-extractor lying here. Which can be built in the pipe. Together with waterproof housing on the back I might get the temperatures cooled down using it. I do not know. Since it's made for fairly large rooms (25m2) it should be good for a very small room with only a table with kvm and a serverrack.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Hopefully other people can benefit by this information too.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
You seem to forget that slang varies wildly across the country, even assuming you're talking about the United States and not somewhere else. I never heard the term "sped" until I was talking to someone from Denver. We used references to Napa for the same effect (there is, or was, a well known mental facility in Napa). I had never heard "special education", shortened to sped, to refer to what you use the term "waterhead" for (presumably from the genetic condition of hydrocephalus), which I've also never heard of before now.
I bought a set of aluminium drive coolers that are smaller than what is shown in that picture for about $10 (Can) each. The fan is 6cm and about 1/4 cm thick mounted to the metal bracket. The metal bracket screws directly onto the drive using the four underside screws (won't work in an Antec mounting solution but those have cooling already ...).
I reversed the fan so that it blew away from the drive, sucking air through the holes in the metal bracket. The bracket being thoroughly connected to the two edges of the drive quite effectively cools the entire surface of the drive.
Even with the fan inoperative, the additional heatsink factor makes this a good solution.
I can't find a better picture, but on page 16 of Tomauri's catalogue there's a picture near the top -- number 2048.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Probably referring to hydrocephalus, a fairly common cause of mental retardation in which a baby is born with too much intercranial fluid, leading to pressure on the brain.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I had read this thread last month, made a mental note of the ideas, and then forgot about it... until I was meandering through Wal-Mart tonight (errr, LAST night):
I found a package of twelve "Vent Filters", intended to be used in floor or wall registers for central air systems. They're just rectangles of 1/16th-inch thick filter material with no framing, cut to fit the width of standard registers and intendeded to be cut to fit the length.
As someone else in this thread noted, filters designed for high-speed airflow might not be appropriate for PC case airflow, and as it happens these are also designed specifically for the generally low air speeds of wall and floor vents.
Price was all of a few bucks. It's made by Web Products of Kansas City, Kansas: www.webproducts.com.
The width of these happens to fit the filter slot in the faceplate of my Antec SX1030 chassis almost perfectly; I never got a filter frame with this case, so I could either stuff several of these in there loose, cut to fit the height, or mod a frame to hold one or more.
These might be exactly what you need for filtering your cases and fans.