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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? ;-)
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.
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.
That's about as logical a complaint about this article as "sure, I can play music on an iPod, but what happens if I'm deaf?"
Answer: you can't use this hack in your case.
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.