hard drive cooling

[itsmatthew]

so a friend of mine recently came up on a lot of 50 heatsinks off ebay. he gave me two. they are approximately 80x80x35mm. i was thinking about stickin one of them and a fan, on a hard drive. im posting here to see if that would be completely futile or if it may have some benefit. the hs is made of aluminum and is black. the hard drive is a western digital 120gb special edition 8mb buffer. my cases' 3.5" rack thingie doesnt have any cooling devices like those fancy (read: ugly) antec cases (is it antec? i dont know... just ignore that last sentence hehe). i do plan on leaving the computer on for days at a time. anyways. thanks for any advice. oh and one other thing. should i stick the heat sink on the side with the circuitry etc or the opposite side thats just a metal cover, id stick it on both if i had enough room.

 

[arcenite]

I just got the Antec Plusview1000AMG and she is not ugly! (lol)

Anyway... Putting a heatsink on one part of the harddrive may give you a little bit of a cooler drive, but the best thing to do is find a way to have a fan blowing on the entire hard drive without a heatsink (or get a hard drive cooler that has a heatsink that covers the entire drive. Cooling a single part of the drive doesn't do too much.

Bill

 

[amcdonald]

The heatsink and fan won't do much good unless there is cooler air nearby... You would be better off trying to use the fan to get fresh air to the hard drive, but if your case airflow is good enough you might not even need any extra cooling for that wd.
If you have no openings in the front panel to draw in air, you could get creative with the location of your hard drive to get it some fresh air.

 

[Bluefront]

Here's my solution to hard drive cooling.....keeps the heat completely outside the case.

External IDE Hard Drive