Shallow profile fans, do they exist?

[Megatomic]

I have a case mod question, someone help me out.

I have a 90mm fan mounted on the side door of my case, close to the HDD cage. This fan is standard in size. The thing I don't like about it is that it presses against the lower HDD in the cage when the door is on making it hard to close properly. Plus I don't like the idea of the fan touching the HDD.

Is there such a thing as a shallow profile fan, where the area of the fan is the same, but the depth of the fan is reduced? I guess the fanblade pitch would be less but I don't really need ALL the airflow the current fan provides.

Thanks in advance fellas.

 

[Blain]

I would think if the blades were touching the HD, you'd know it. How about just cutting away the offending fan housing?

I've got a 50x10mm fan mounted behind my MB tray blowing on the backside of the MB @ the CPU socket. That was a close fit. The fan didn't touch the side panel. But there wasn't much room for air intake into the fan. I carved the fan housing down a little between the screw holes and BINGO!

 

[Megatomic]

That's an option I'm considering for sure. The fan blades are not touching the HDD, it is the fan casing. The first thing I am going to do is measure the depth dimension of the fan. Maybe it is the 38mm variety, in which case I'll just buy a 25mm deep fan to replace it with. 25mm is quite common it turns out.