Hard Drive Cooling

[Rubicone]

I have read that one of the reasons for hard drive not lasting longer than they could is heat. Is there a way of monitoring the temperature of a hard drive and what cooling solutions should one apply? I saw one person who had an intake fan at the front of his hard drive bay.

 

[LavrentiBeria]

Comrade Rubicone,

Greetings from the peace-loving people of the socialist motherland.

There are at least two reasons that a hard drive might die an early death and, you are quite right, one of them is overheating. The other, of more interest to us here at the Commissariat of Internal Affairs, is the very likely possibility of sabotage, but leave those matters to us, comrade, we will see that saboteurs receive the treatment they deserve.

Drives with rotation speeds of 7,200 RPM and up are typically the ones most in need of some kind of cooling help. I know of no IDE devices at the moment with rates higher than 7,200, however, so we'd have to consider them borderline. I use small PC Power & Cooling drive coolers, or stick-on fans, with such drives and with SCSI devices of the same speed, they lower the drive's operating temperature by 10-25 degrees. For quicker 10,000 RPM and 15,000 RPM SCSI drives, I use PC Power & Cooling bay coolers, multiple fan units with even greater cooling capability. While I have seen no equivalent of the PC Power & Cooling stick-on fans, there are certainly alternative bay coolers available. It can only help to employ coolers that you like and are appropriate to your circumstances.

Yours in the joy of socialist labor.

LavrentiBeria

PS: There are still copies of my book, Lavrenti Beria, A Softy Looks At His Life, available, comrade. We would hate to have to stop by at two in the morning to see if you have one. eh?

 

[GAZZA]

LOL LavrentiBeria

I personally have hard drive coolers on all my drives bar one and those that are being cooled are using both passive with active cooling , which means in laymans terms

Passive Cooling = surface contact heatsink much like a heatsink on a cpu .

Active Cooling = actual air movement such as fans blowing across the surface of the drive .

There are quite a few active/passive coolers out there that attach to your drive and have fans on them to dissipate the heat .

Here is one of the coolers I use Baycooler
And here is the one I use on my 10k rpm SCSI drive Global Win King Kong