advice on cooling my 5 hard disks a bit more please

snow patrol · 1 Aug 2007 at 13:15

Hi all, i have 5 sata disks in my bays, and during the summer they're starting to get a bit toasty, and obviously the general system temp is rising as a result.

Case pic here:

http://img107.imageshack.us/img107/7021/dsc0244gr2.jpg

As you can see, i have an intake fan at the rear, though i'm not sure how much good this is doing as its airflow must be restricted by my heat sink. And i also have a fan at the front (in front of the disks) sucking air out of the case.

Do i need to do something with another fan? I tried blowing a 120 low speed fan over the ram (because i wanted to clock the ram higher) but this only served to make the system even warmer. Any thoughts?

temps drop quite a bit when case side is off (cpu down from 37 to 30 idle, sytem down from 47 to 39ish)

wellibob · 1 Aug 2007 at 14:17

Yep, them hard drives will pump out some heat. other than getting a bigger case, not a lot you can do, other than blow fans on them.

markyb · 1 Aug 2007 at 14:21

snow patrol, try turning the rear case fan around. At the moment the fan is blowing from the rear which will increase your temps with the side on and turn the front fan so that it will blowing air over the hard drives. This is without the best method of getting down your temps.

By turning it around it will vent all of the hot air outside of the PC.

As for the hard drives, theres not a lot you can do other than try and move some of them into the CD-ROM bays. But so long the fan is pretty powerful you should be fine.

weescott · 1 Aug 2007 at 14:23

Your intake fan is at the rear and exhaust at the front? :confused:

It should be the other way around. Can you re-mount the HSF so it blows air out of the case?

Reposition the middle HDD into the 5 1/4" drive to let some air into the case and cool the drives better.

Chris Beard · 1 Aug 2007 at 14:43

Why do you have 5 drives? Have you considered an external hard disk array?

krooton · 1 Aug 2007 at 15:16

How big are the drives?

Replace them with fewer, but larger ones perhaps?

james.miller · 1 Aug 2007 at 15:19

i see space above your floppy drive. move one up there.

sort the fan directions out, change the direction of the cpu heatink so the fan is blowing air straight out to the rear (exhaust) fan

easyrider · 1 Aug 2007 at 15:23

The simple solution here like mentioned would be to have the intake fan at the front blowing cool air over the HDD's and the outtake fan at the back sucking hot air out the case.

This is the correct way to do it.

I have the same case:

AKASA Amber at the front sucking in cool air over the hardrives.

AKASA Amber at the back sucking hot air out.

This setup has always kept my drives nice and cool.

snow patrol · 1 Aug 2007 at 16:14

thanks guys, i will get that sorted. I have an external disk as well. Thanks again for the advice

Chris Beard · 1 Aug 2007 at 16:50

snow patrol said:
thanks guys, i will get that sorted. I have an external disk as well. Thanks again for the advice

You downloaded the internet? My mate did that, he's got a big ol' metal chest of DVDs.

snow patrol · 1 Aug 2007 at 18:05

i have a fair few large files, let's just leave it at that. Also - i hate deleting stuff, and i like to always have stuff to hand.

Just swapped the fans around and moved the middle hard drive as suggested and things seem much cooler. Waiting for the system temp to reach a stable level before giving an exact figure.

Thanks again for the advice!

g00dsh0t · 1 Aug 2007 at 22:14

on your pic it looks like you can remove those screws(fr fan side)in the hd drives and slide the drives closer to the front fan. This will give you some space to mount a 120 fan on the other side of drives(wired) in a push / pull config. I have installed it like this on a previous pc years ago to good affect, hope this helps m8