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Cooling a solid block of four hard drives.

I

iamtrout

Diamond Member
I have the Chenming 301KEG case and I hate it. But for the time being I'm stuck with it. If you look at the hard drive cage you'll see that it fits four hard drives, all four of them stacked flush with each other.

I have four hard drives.

When I have all four in the drive cage running, they get hot to the point of hurting when I touch them. Now, I know HDDs run hot, but this is starting to be scary... any way to cool this stuff down?

Watercooling: Too expensive/Space constraints - case is tiny
Aircooling: Case constraints and effectiveness on a solid 4inch x 4inch x 5inch block
New Case: I've cut up this case to hell already (read: no reselling) but definitely an option

Just wondering what other people out there use to cool off their numerous HDDs, or if they don't.
 
add another hard drive cage below the stock one?


just a thought


stacking drives close makes it to hot for them
 
If you don't mind a project, chop the case up even more... Where there are air holes by the drive cage, cut that out and the plastic front bezzle as well. Then put an intake fan right there so that you will have air moving over you drives and hopefully blow the trapped heat out of there. Your case temps will most likely go up, but it's worth it if it means getting an extra year out of your drives.
 
You could hang one drive from the HDD cage with string or something and put another on the floor of the case.
 
But he would have to put something rubber underneith it to avoid frying the circuit board. I don't know why HD makers don't protect against that yet!
 
Originally posted by: Cawchy87
But he would have to put something rubber underneith it to avoid frying the circuit board. I don't know why HD makers don't protect against that yet!
Click to expand...
Antistatic bag perhaps?
 
It wouldn't be hard as you point out (a bag). But just so that he knows and doesn't fry his hard drive and blame anandtech 🙂 .
 
I've seen some great suspended hard disks done before - using bungee cord I believe. If you can do it well, you should be able to suspend two hard disks below the cage which should decrease temps a bit. Otherwise there are some pretty good 5.25" hard disk coolers available (such as the Cool Drive 4 from CM), but if you had to spend money, it'd probably be better invested in another case.
 
Originally posted by: Degrador
Originally posted by: LifeStealer
Look it!
http://www.silentpcreview.com/...amp;artid=8&page=1
Click to expand...

No, no, the suspension I was talking about is where the elastic cord comes down from the cage, and the hard drives are attached to the cord and just hang below the cage. Not sure where I saw the article though...

(Reason I say this is that it's not a silencing issue here - he just doesn't want to have all the hard disks in the cage)
Click to expand...

Yea I know but it will give him some ideas.
 
Thanks for the enthusiastic replies guys. Well, one of my hard drives just died, so I guess it makes this topic moot for the time being.

But...

There is no space underneath the drive cage because of wiring and pump. No space for floating mounting styles because those require space that I already don't have.

I'll try uploading a picture when I get back to my dorm (tomorrow). It's not pretty.
 
you really should never have harddrives adjacent to each other. Heat build up is immense. Go every other slot at all costs, else you be a sad panda when you start losing stuff. You could get some 5.25" bay kits and install your harddrives in there. So, in short, if you had 4 hdd (i know one died) elastic suspend 1 of them, install 2 of them in the 3.5" bay, and buy some cooling kit for 5.25" bay for other hdd.
 
Originally posted by: Tiamat
you really should never have harddrives adjacent to each other. Heat build up is immense. Go every other slot at all costs, else you be a sad panda when you start losing stuff. You could get some 5.25" bay kits and install your harddrives in there. So, in short, if you had 4 hdd (i know one died) elastic suspend 1 of them, install 2 of them in the 3.5" bay, and buy some cooling kit for 5.25" bay for other hdd.
Click to expand...

OR he could have just gotten a case that was able to hold more drives in bays made to hold them. A quality case will already space out the hard drive cage(s) so that there is enough air flow between drives to not make them overheat.

Yet another reason NOT to go with cheap cases... When will people learn??
 
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