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HD in 5.25 bay - Idea, but would enough use it to make them marketable?

M

McCarthy

Platinum Member
Before I describe what I was thinking, a question which applies to it's usefulness must be asked:

Do you have hard drives mounted in 5.25 bays? If so how many?

Ok, on with the story. I was trying to recall where I have a mounting kit sitting around in anticipation of buying another HD, probably bare drive without kit. Thought occurred to me, drives are running warm these days, not HOT, but warm enough to pay attention to them no doubt. The "adapter" kits to put a 3.5" drive in a 5.25" bay have always been those U shaped steel ones. Which work fine. But don't draw much heat at all away from the drive so all that extra space you have in the larger bay isn't doing you much good.

The idea was to have aluminum brackets instead - made from solid blocks, fins machined in. Drill the holes for the mounting screws to go into the drive, tap the holes for mounting to the case (or rails) and you're done. Yes, heatsinks for the drive. With good airflow they'd help keep your drive even cooler, without airflow they'll at least draw the heat from the drive to the case itself...where it'll disappate slowly going from aluminum to steel (and virtually not at all with railed installs), but help a bit.

For guys already using active cooling of the drives, a bonus. For ones not, a start. For case modders, something cooler looking than bent steel. And I'd be able to go to my favorite heatsink retailer to find them instead of digging through closets to find old kits....selfishness always applies.

Thoughts? Or has this already been done and I've just never run across it?

--Mc
 
First question; are your Hds SCSI or IDE?? SCSI drives run much hotter than IDE. I am using HD removable trays on my IDEs. Tray has a small fan pulling air over the HD into the case. With two of these; you can exchange HDs, so that you can use many HDs, but only two at once or more if you have extra space. I have a good exhaust system keeping case cool. My Hds are about the temperature as having a high fever. So the system works very well. The only problem is that many companies "think very highly" of their trays and charge accordingly. Some want a much as $40 each. I get mine at electrotex.com for $14.95 + tax. Actually they have several stores in Texas and I only drove 45 miles to the big city. They are not the best construction, are very good for the price and am quite pleased with them. Hope this helps.

Gene
 
McCarthy,
Your idea sounds very interesting; but the cost would probably be excessive to the extreme! Why not try to mount the hard drive on the bottom of the case behind a front air intake fan (where the coolest air in the case is)? If you would be interested in discussing this type of mounting further, send me a message.
 
A block of aluminum wouldn't be all that expensive.
(of course, I'm probably in the minority in that my dad has a metal lathe in the basement)

I've toyed around with the idea of something like this, but it's basically what a lot of hard drive coolers are. I'd just find one of the big heatsink ones, and rip the fans and crap off of the front.
 
A lathe ain't gonna do it! A lathe is best used to produce circular products. A milling machine would be a more appropriate machine to use. As far as the expense; the steel mounting brackets can be obtained (if a person doesn't already have many laying around) for as little as $1.50 a set!
 
You can mill on a lathe with the appropriate accessories. I've made heatsinks on it before.
 
Changed the title, maybe I can clear up what I mean.

I don't have the tools to make them here, nor enough reason to. My drives don't run hot, just that if there was such a product and I had a choice between it and the steel brackets I'd like to go this route. As is I do have an 80mm fan I already had stuffed in place just to be safe, I wouldn't if I had brackets like these.

Guess the question is if Globalwin or Thermalright or whoever were to make them, would you buy them?
Say if they were $10? Not looking to determine a pricepoint from a small thread, just shooting out a price to see if anyone would be interested. If someone from a heatsink company reads this and wants to run with it just send me a set.

Just seems with drives getting warmer and generally being located in fairly dead zone areas of the case it'd be an easy way to draw away some heat from our drives using an existing item (the 5.25~3.5 adapter) and wouldn't require a fan to be of use, though it'd help even more with it. I really don't know how many would use them if they were available, seems active coolers sell well, but then this wouldn't help with overall case airflow. They wouldn't increase noise either though....

The way I have it envisioned you could still use the "disk top" coolers, the front intake fan based ones have their own brackets so it wouldn't work there, though they could of course incorporate this into their design - and maybe that's where this idea would fit best. Wouldn't prevent CDroms or anything else from being mouted in adjoining drives so there's really no downside other than the upfront cost (vs the $1.50 steel ones).

Anyway, just curious.

--Mc
 
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