Harddrive cooling - worth it?

[Westy]

Ive got a couple of 80gb Seagate Barracuda IV's and they get a little toasty after a good leeching session, was looking at getting a TT hardcano, but just aint sure where they go, how effective are they, how many harddrives can they cool and are they neccesary?

Anyone had any experience?

[SilverPriest]

You dont need a dedicated hard drive cooler.
As long as there is some air flowing over them you should be fine.
Most HD's are designed to live in cramped poorly ventilated beige boxes for years.
But giving them some airflow is a good idea :)
This is how my hard drives are setup in my Aopen HX-08 full tower case:
Just 2x80mm fans running @ 7v, very quiet, and damn good cooling.
They are exhausting the air from the case, as well as cooling my HD's
Since my case has 2 huge 120mm fans in the front, the case temp isnt too much to worry about.
(Read: Ambient)
If there is an option to do something like my 80mm setup, then by all means, as they are generally quieter, and give a lot more airflow than those horrid little 40mm fans in HD coolers.
What case do you have?
As one of the HD coolers may be your best bet.........

[Sydog]

As he said, plus it will be cheaper to buy 2 fans than two hdd coolers

but if you would like the cpu temp displayed then a hardcano is good. Then you could just get a cheapo hdd cooler for the other hdd.

[KingJackal]

Hard-drive coolers are generally designed to fit, and cool one hard-drive at a time.

This page (http://www.thermaltake.com/products/hdcoolerMenu.htm) is the manufacturer's page for the hardcano line ( a popular one ) of hard-drive coolers. Have a look at the specs pages - they ought to give you a better idea of what they do.

They're certainly not necissary, but if you're paranoid ( and when it comes to hard-drives, that's often a good way to be ) then there may be advantages. Me? I'm g[H]3tt0 - I just have a stereo amp heatsink lying on top of my primary drive :D. The important thing for me being to just spread that heat out a bit so the hard-drive gets down a bit closer to ambient temperature.

[edit]shutup, Gh0s7 L3mUr :p

[Gh0s7 L3mUr]

oooooooh is that a spelling mistake I sees there KJ. :D

But yeah if you can don't stack em, and as long as the ambient temp in your case is good, so your HDDs should be.

[Mashed_Penguin]

I had two 7200 rpm seagates in my case a while ago on top of each other. The temps between them got to 45 degrees once. Tis fixed now.

[Westy]

Mashed : how'd you fix it?

Silver : will be putting them into an enermax 710 i think it is (southerly server from styles ;) )

i think the hardcano would be a waste in this though, as that looks alot like an exhaust on the front of it, which would be blowing into nothing but drive cover door :p

i think ill just try get some airflow over them.

[KingJackal]

The cheapest solution is just to use your common sense.

Space out your harddrives. If you have 4 10,000rpm SCSI drives stacked right on top of one another, you'll be RMAing the middle couple every month or two ( no joke, unfortunately ). If you have IDE drives ( 5k or 7k ), and just leave a little room between them and other devices so they can breath - then those warranties aren't likely to get used ;).

Just not stacking harddrives will lengthen their life more that any harddrive cooler :).

[Gh0s7 L3mUr]

Originally posted by KingJackal

[edit]shutup, Gh0s7 L3mUr :p [/B]

Lol :eek:

Sorry just couldn't resist. :o :D