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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.
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Your data called.
It wants the integrity of its magnetic field back.
what about when you have several drives or a tiny case?
*This* is top-grade engineering! This could be used to cool down spacecraft re-entering earth atmosphere :|
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
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"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.
You don't?
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
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.
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 !
Absolutely. That's why on hot summer days I sit behind a nice cool fan facing away from me.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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 .
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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.
...hook up a spray mister as well to increase your cooling capacity!
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
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.
Big Mistake in the article: Use only nylon straps as brackets. A metal strap conducts the fan vibration to the hard drive.
Unmount your hard drive (but leave the cables attached) and power up the system. Touch your hard drave - can you even tell that its spinning? No vibrations.
Now, mount a cheapie fan to it, and touch it - a LOT more vibrations. And it will only get worse as the fan wears.
Anyone who mounts fans to their hard drives to cool them deserves what they get - you'll be losing data within a few months, and probably end up with a completely fucked drive.
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.
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'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 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.
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.