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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."
The magnetic field produced by a small DC fan might not be enough to faze the platter. It takes a magnetic field of a certain strength to make a change in the data bits.
I have a few Compaq Xeon workstations that placed the drives transversely in front of the system power supply so cooling air can pass between the drives. I have yet to see a problem. It's designed to cool 15k RPM drives very quietly. The PSU fan itself is a slower 12cm fan, placed on the intake of the PSU, only a few cm away from the drive's edges. It's very quiet for a PC, and very impressively quiet for a system with a 15k RPM drive in it.
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.
You don't?
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
Some 7500RPM or higher drives that aren't well engineered can overheat in small spaces.
I personally had a Western Digital 80gb harddrive overheat and cause errors in a normal midtower. (Several of my friends had the same problem with the same model)
Since then my addage is if it's 7500rpm or higher put some fans on it. Since that realization I've had no problems.
Uhh... yes, yes you do.
The CPU fan takes surrounding air, blowing it down towards the CPU and forcing it through the vanes of the heat sink.
Push or pull, the main point in drive cooling is to move around the air so that hot pockets don't form around them, and the hot air is more likely to be vented by the case fans.
A boss of mine who used to work for Air Force Intel told me that the magnetic field used to de-gauss an HDD had to be about as strong as a car-lifting magnet. I seriously doubt that the field generated by an 80mm fan is even enough to penetrate the steel housing of the drive (maybe not even the circuit board, since it's bottom-mounted).
What if this weren't a hypothetical question?
Heh. This reminds me of the Sparc2 drive upgrade trick. They didn't have enough cooling for significantly larger hard drives. But with a drill, a careful eye, and a stencil of a newer and larger fan, you could put in a new fan of similar size and twice the capacity and upgrade the heck out of the Sparc2 disk drive.
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.
It doesn't have to de-gauss the HDD. All it has to do is fry the ever-so-sensitive CMOS circuitry that interfaces with the platters. It's not going to take a lot...
I've managed, unfortunately, to fry a pda that way. Pda was in my pants pocket. I was drilling holes in my wall. The EM field from the drill fried the motherboard. And they weren't that close together...
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.
Big Mistake in the article: Use only nylon straps as brackets. A metal strap conducts the fan vibration to the hard drive.
I have a whirlpool air-purifier, and it has a pre-filter which is a thin "foam" filter like I think you want. They sell at Lowes a roll or large peice that can be cut to size to replace the whirlpool's pre-filter (10 or 20 bucks for 2foot by 2foot approx). I looked on the Lowes site and couldn't find it, but it is in the store's section by the air-filters/air-purifiers.
-Joe4
Silly Rabbit: tricks are for kids.
I'd suggest your local hardware store/Canadian tire ... buy a furnace filter (About $5) and cut chunks out of it to the right size. maybe get some strips of velcro at the same hardware store. put a bit in each corner of the fan and a bit on the filter and voila .. easy to change and secure for about $6. And given the size of furance air filters, one should last you a year or more.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
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.
What you want is the fiberglass filter media type. It is exceedingly cheap, easy to work with, and effective. You can get a roll at Grainger - 20 ft. long, 30 in. wide, 1 in. thick for a whopping 14 bucks.
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:) And yes, it is anti-static, it's glass after all. If you're paranoid, spray some fabric softener on it. The dust that sticks to it, however, is certainly not. Be sure to change the filter regularly!
http://www.grainger.com/Grainger/productdetail.js
That roll should last you the rest of your life
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