HDD cooling?!

bannedbrother

bannedbrother

bannedbrother

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Clockers, hope you all looking forward to the weekend. So I am in process of doing a serious case mod on my 400R. This meant removing the hard drive bays too. I am thinking of moving the HDD and SSD into the unused optical bays. My question is: Do we really need a cooling fan to keep the HDD cooled? Where I am planning to put the HDD there will not be any fan in front of it. The HDD is a WD 1TB Caviar. Do you think this will be a problem? Thanks
 
You can usually monitor HDD temperatures using software such as Speedfan. So install away and keep an eye. Provided you have vented 5.25" bay covers there should be some airflow. The mounting mechanism of the HDD also has an effect, if its screwed in then whatever it's attached to will act like a heatsink.

I went bungee mounting on my old case and needed to separate my two mechanicals by 5cm and also open up a gap in the solid front covers.
 
Not sure if they're still available but Zalman used to do a cooler / adapter for fitting a 3.5" HDD into an optical bay. Chunky aluminium sinks that clamp either side of the drive with heatpipes connecting them, then anti-vibration rubber mounts to screw it into the bay.

Should keep it cool and quiet with even the tiniest amount of airflow.
 
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/images/editor/color.gifYarwoodUK's is close to range I try to keep mine in; 30-50c depending on drive. My Samsung HD154UI pair are 30-40c, ST32000542AS pair are 35-45c and my ST3750640NS pair are 40-50c.


Just found this from Seagate:
The drive should never exceed the temperature ranges below. If the drives ever exceed these temperature ranges then the drive is considered "overheated" or is not getting adequate air flow from your current case environment.

With our newer model drives the maximum temperature is now at 60 degrees Celsius.

The operating temperature range for most Seagate hard drives is 5 to 50 degrees Celsius. A normal PC case should provide adequate cooling.

However, if your enclosure is unable to maintain this range, we suggest that you contact your system manufacturer for information on cooling and ventilation hardware that is compatible with your specific configuration.

The answer to this question depends on your case environment. If you have adequate cooling, it is probably not necessary. If you feel that you need additional cooling, use your favorite internet search engine and enter the keywords "drive bay cooling kit".
Click to expand...
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/193771en?language=en_US


Google did a study that appears in the appears in the proceedings of the 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST’07), February 2007
"Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population"
Which indicates high heat HDDs have less failure than low.. but too many unexplained variables in the data.
http://static.googleusercontent.com...arch.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf

After studying it I had more questions than when I started and few answers. Some of their results show little correlation to over all age because there are too many discrepancies. My guess is some batches of drives had higher failure rates than others.. and this was a bigger contributing factor than age or heat.

PCWorld "High Heat May not Harm Hard Drives" based on Google's study.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/129420/article.html
 
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