My parhelia to be replaced.

[KvHagedorn]

I have a hard drive (not using it) that would BURN you if you touched it during operation without a heat sink or fans, but it still worked fine if you kept it reasonably cool. This was one of the first IBM 10k drives.. a half height 9gb model. Damn loud whining thing, too. What an annoyance.

[Kurt]

Originally posted by leech
It DOES benefit... lowers the heat of my harddrives by about 10 degrees each... Here's the full situation..

I have two 10,000 rpm Ultra160 SCSI Hard Drives. They are both Full-Height (got them pretty cheap at the time), so unfortunately they generate A LOT of heat. If the room is cool, I can leave my side of the case on (the case is an Antec P160) and the front 120mm fan will cool them sufficiently, and keep all my system nice and cool (I have another 120mm fan on the back of the case blowing outwards). The CPU keeps fairly cool with or without the side on. But those hard drives.... well, when the air on the outside is extremely hot anyhow... and then it blows hot air INTO the case, then it creeps out the back... I figured more air flowing directly onto the harddrives while they're hot is best... The rest of the PC is just running fine...

Now if I had half-height drives, I think they would be running quite a lot cooler, sice they'd have more room seperating the drives. Here I only have about 2.5-3.5 inches. Besides, if something else in my computer fried, it'd just cost me money... the information on my drives cost me a lot more than just money.

Leech

You should consider either changing drives or changing case.

Since you'r probably not using it as a server on a large network, you'd probably be better off with a couple of WD Raptors instead. In doubt, you can always hit storagereview.com, they have a nice article on RAID, SCSI, SATA etc...

You could always try to make a drive cage to gain more space between the drives or (dunno if it's possible) sometimes there's a way to attach the drive from the bottom on the last 3.5" bay inside the PC (screw it in on the bottom of the 3.5" cage).

[leech]

which HDD is specced to 45C?

It's an IBM DMVS36V according to the WinXP Device manager. I'm not 100% sure if the S.M.A.R.T. is reporting it correctly or not. It's the linux smartmontools that I used to measure the temps.

Leech

[dZeus]

according to specsheets on Hitachi's site, it's specced to operate with temps up to 50 C. That's still rather low though for a HDD, so indeed you might want to cool it well

[leech]

See... so I'm not totally off my rocker.. only a little bit People blabbering about case dynamics and air flow... bah. I KNOW how to do air flow, and I know it screws up the rest of the airflow to have the side of the case off. But I also know from the empirical evidence that putting that fan on the side is helping tremendously for my hard drives, which is (next to the CPU) the hottest component in my computer. My CPU runs from about 125 F to 135 F. I think it goes up as far as 145 F when running games and such. Which is pretty cool for a P4 3.06ghz.

Leech

[RUS007]

I've installed a 10,200BTU AC beside my computer station to keep things cool

[G400SG16mb]

hard drives are more likely to fail if they're running hotter. On the other hand, the vibrations from fans also quite bad for them.

[Greebe]

Originally posted by G400SG16mb
On the other hand, the vibrations from fans also quite bad for them.

If the fans cause that much vibration you should replace them.

[Wombat]

If you're worried about vibrations, then the whole case would be a cause of problems. If you really think it could be a problem G400SG, then you should probably have the drives mounted on rubber grommets anyway.

[leech]

*cough cough* they ARE mounted on rubber grommets. Anyone have one of the Antec P160 cases? They kick ass... the biggest problem with my hard drives, I think, is that they are full height drives and so they are closer together than they could be. The little trays that the P160 comes with has rubber grommets on the bottom where you mount the Hard drives... as it shows here.

Leech

[RUS007]

If you install your drives in to Vantec Vortex Hard Drive Cooling Systems they will sit on rubber feet as well.