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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."
Did we really need an article on Slashdot to figure this one out? ;-)
what about when you have several drives or a tiny case?
Who knew you could attach things to other things using a bracket and screws? Thanks again Slashdot.
Most of us (excusing those few who statistically show up all the time and can't manage to tie shoelaces).
What most of us mightn't have realised is that a cheap & nasty solution works so much better for its intended job than some of the pricey (but flashy!) fixes.
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/
... 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.
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 !
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.
You sit in front of a fan to move that encourage the evaporation (i.e., cooling process) of that hot sweat off your body by increasing the coefficient of conduction of air. Unless you have a sweaty fan, you should be moving the air away from it.
Whether the fan is blowing toward the heat sink, pushing in cooler air and displacing hot air in all other directions, or blowing away from the heat sink, pushing hot air away in a specific direction and pulling in cooler air in from all other directions, the same thing is being accomplished - warm air removed from the vacinity of the heat sink and cooler air replacing it.
The only real difference is where you are pushing the warmer air - with an intake fan the hot air gets pushed usually to the sides of the heat sink, and can raise the temperature of nearby components - with an exhaust fan you direct the warmer air usually up and away from the board. (and possibly onto something else you'd rather not heat up, like your hard drive) Although with an exhaust fan you are pulling air into the heat sink from nearby components, which could in itself reduce the cooling efficiency of your heat sink, while benefiting nearby components.
So choosing between exhaust and intake probably depends a lot on the physical layout of your case. A universal good selection would probably be exhaust that takes the air directly to the outside of the case.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
You sir are retarded. and I quote "newer fans don't emit any magnetic field at all, as they don't use electric motors" WTF do you think make the fan blades spin?! telekenisis?! A strong feeling that it'll work?! The only difference between modern fans and old stile is that the "motor" is on the fan itself instead of in the middle with the fan mounted on a rotating drive shaft. What's really wrong with people now a days? do they not teach anything in school anymore, or is our society doomed to being ruled by waterheads?!
Actually, I did this myself a few years ago (I live in Hawaii, no AC, 5.25" drive cooling mounts with the little fans in front wear out fast because of the dust) but I considered it a gross kluge because the drive took up 2 3.5" bays at best (I had to make my own brackets for that.. the ones I bought at ACE caused the drive to take up a few millimeters more than 2 bays, which was definitely unacceptable). I got the idea after seeing the fan mount setup for the zalman flower heatsink, figuring something like that might work for HDDs too. In the end, unless you plan to buy full tower cases in order to mount about 3 HDDs, it's just better to dremel the a hole for an 80mm fan in the front of the case where the fan would give good airflow across the drives... which is something I could've got in a better stock case if I was willing to pay the $40 s/h :p.
I think the magnetic field would oscilate proportional to the number of stators times the RPM... and of course there are harmonics.
There could also be much higher frequency EM emmisions depending on it's make-up (eg. PWM switcher for speed control).
But I'm sure neither of these are as intense as the 10,000 RMP high curent motor that spins the platters.
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.
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...
Bullshit. I am an embedded systems designer and there's no way in hell your drill induced enough of an EM field to generate significant current in the traces of your PDA's mainboard. The stuff I design is strapped on to heatsink with thousands of Amps running through it without any kind of EMC protection and it runs flawlessly. Static discharge is more likely than not the cause of that particular failure.
An electric drill -- of the non-cordless variety -- throws out just such an EM field. Try firing one up next to your monitor. (At the risk of advertising my age -- this is slashdot, I know better than to say dating myself -- back in the old days this was considered one way to manually de-gauss a monitor. Move an electric drill under power back and forth around the edges. It worked, after a fashion. Or at least we got a neat light show out of it.)
The EM field you see on your monitor is not capable of inducing any serious current into anything; (cheap) monitors are extremely sensitive to any magnetic field. Even your flexible fridge magnets have enough of a field to cause deflection errors. You can also confirm that the drill's field is NOT far-reaching just by noticing how much reduced the effect is even 6 inches away.
Throwing a little current into the traces is not what you have to worry about. It's the CMOS chips. A changing EM field can induce a current in the silicon itself, as well as the wires leading to it. It doesn't take a lot to fry one. As in you won't even feel the electric shock.
This is where I can tell that you have some electricity knowlege but it's only "enough to be dangerous." -- Yes, CMOS is sensitive but it is sensitive because of the extremely thin oxide later at the junction of the FETs. Static electricity can punch through this oxide layer at extraordinarily low potentials. Magnetic fields can damage equipment by induction. If it hasn't got enough power to induce signficant current in the traces, it ain't gonna do shit to the (much much much smaller) traces on the dies. ICs (CMOS or otherwise) are far more likely to die from static than induced currents simply because it's rather hard to get a strong enough magnetic field coupled to the circuit board in such a way to generate a damaging current.
I don't know what you're designing, but I generally don't run current through my heatsinks. At thousands of amps, your heat loss is going to be enormous (RI^2). What voltage are you running at? Is it some ultra-low-voltage ultra-high-current app? Or are you in some massive industrial environment? Is your heatsink between your circuit and the powerline? Is it acting as a faraday shield? Is the current AC or DC? Is it changing over time? Is your circuit moving relative to the powerline? Or have you avoided that whole inductive currents issue? Are you really sticking CMOS right next to a strong inductive field with no shielding? Not even a little pig iron? Or are you using TTL or other, more robust, less sensitive, components?
Industrial motion controllers, soft starters and VFDs. Unbelievably noisy environments and no, the only thing between the heat sink and the circuit board is a sheet of 3/8" Lexan. It's all AC (at least in, we do some DC conversion for oddball applications, startup current is typically 3-6x the running (steady-state) current, and fault currents can be thousands of times nominal, although part of the job of the controller is to prevent them. The ICs on the board are almost exclusively CMOS (PICs, Motorola 683XX, op-amps, ADCs, etc.). The heat sink is used as the conductor, it sandwiches the high current "hockey puck" style SCRs. (it's been a while since I've seen a large VFD but I think they still use the brick style modules.)
Back when I used to work in the magnetometer lab, we had serious problems with inductive noise. It's amazing how many sources there are. Then again, we were working at the sub-microvolt level. Ventilation moving the wires caused us noise. Still, I earned my stripes on unwanted inductively and capacitively coupling fields.
Yes; if you're trying to measure tiny voltages you are in for a rough ride; one of the engineers here used to build detectors for tiny tiny currents. The measurement table was not only stabilized but had to be isolated from the rest of the room for motion. All the wires had to be taped down and immobilized or their motion would induce (ti