Hard drive cooling !

[GAZZA]

I've seen many debates on whether or not hard drives need cooling and I have been an advocate in the belief that some hard drives (not all) would benefit from some form of cooling.

Well I bought myself a nice new Aluminum case which had a neat little hard drive enclosure with enough room for 5 hard drives and had two fans blowing across the drives, so I stuck all the hard drives in together noting that there really wasn't a lot of room in between the installed drives.

My previous case was a full blown tower and 3 out of my 5 hard drives were in hard drive coolers, my Atlas 10kII (10k rpm) sits on a old GlobalWin King Kong hard drive cooler with 3 40mm fans blowing across it which did a great job of cooling it down and also two 5400 Maxtor 80 gig drives were in Coolermaster enclosures.

Well a week after moving all my hardware into the new case my Atlas and one of my Maxtors has deceased ! (insert p!ssed emoticon here) and were extremely hot to the touch, which I believe contributed to their demise, luckily both my drives have plenty of warrantly left on them and once I get them back from RMA they will both be going back into their previous hard drive coolers.

just thought I post my exp

 

[DerwenArtos12]

it has been proven byt eh anandtech staff in one of the reviews(which one idon't remember) that if nothing else hard drive coolers will prolong the life of your HDDs.

 

[GAZZA]

It would nice if the drive manufacturers would find better ways of increasing contact area/s as they're really not a lot of contact area available to really reduce the amount of heat generated, especially 10/15k rpm drives.

 

[beatle]

Sorry to hear about your drive loss. I've not yet lost a drive due to heat (that I know of). It seems that if cooling was a requirement for reliability, manufacturers would encourage it. I only see high rpm scsi drives get warm enough to require cooling. I guess it also depends on your room and ambient temperatures whether you would need a drive cooler or not.