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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.
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.
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?