Silverstone TJ06 design flaw and hard drive cooling

[imported_BIOSMonkey]

Well, I just built my new system over the past week (Asus A8N-SLI, AMD64 3500+, XP ProSP2) and everything has gone very smoothly.

However, I have noted what I consider to be a pretty serious problem (or more accurately, what WILL be a serious problem).

The design of the TJ06 has the hard drive cage under the power supply, and it has space for six drives. I specifically chose this case for this reason, because I built the machine as a fast gaming and Photoshop workstation and I wanted some drives for raid0 (scratch, general data) and raid1 (photos, client files).

In the hard drive cage I have the following SATA drives :
1) 75GB Raptor (boot/OS drive)
2) empty slot
3) Hitachi 160GB
4) Hitachi 160GB
5) Hitachi 160GB
6) Hitachi 160GB

Drives 3&4 are in RAID 0 on the nvidia chip, and drives 5&6 are in RAID1 on the silicon image chip. As I said, everything is installed and working fine.

But then I noticed the HUGE amount of heat coming out of this case, especially the power supply. See, the idea of this design was to have a power supply with a bottom intake fan to pull heat off the hard drives and blow it out the rear fan. Nice idea, but there are two big problems:

1) heat from all of these drives is just too great for the power supply fan to move enough air to cool them (they are almost too hot to touch)
2) the super-heated air going INTO the power supply is certainly not good for it (i.e. it gets NO cooling), and I see it seriously shortening its usable life (it is a Silverstone Zeus 550).

This sucks...because this is supposed to be a rock-solid stable system (I do not overclock) but I am now worried about heat failure. I had no idea these drives would generate so much heat....this thing is going to make my office like an oven!!!

I DID get the case with the clear window on the side, and the window does allow visibility of the drive cage. So, I am thinking my only real option is to drill vent holes in front of the drive cage and mount two fans on the inside to blow directly over the drives.

Any other ideas?

 

[MrControversial]

Do you have any side fans on your case? Could you link to a pic of your case so I can think of some ideas? I was thinking that if there was ever a reason for a side intake/exhaust, this would be it. A side exhaust would help pull the air out of the unit. Another thing you could think about is the ambient temps in your office. For a server like that, you need a cool environment or the cooling scheme won't matter.

A second option would be a rear exhaust fan to take some of the pressure off of the PSU. Seriously, the PSU in an ATX system was designed to aid in CPU cooling, not cooling six 50C HDDs. Slap a nice rear fan on their with decent RPM (noise) to blow that air out the back.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: BIOSMonkey
The design of the TJ06 has the hard drive cage under the power supply, and it has space for six drives. I specifically chose this case for this reason, because I built the machine as a fast gaming and Photoshop workstation and I wanted some drives for raid0 (scratch, general data) and raid1 (photos, client files).

Ratz, the Lian Li V1000 would have offered you a fan to push air over the HDs and out the PS. 😉

 

[imported_llama]

for the price you would of expected some more thought put into the design of the case in particular the kandalf from thermaltake has space for 3 drives up in the top of the case with an exhaust fan right next to them

 

[stevem326]

Maybe you could have your case customized for you by putting one or two fans in the top (similar to some of the Koolance cases). If not that, then I'd vote for putting a new side panel on that has a fan in it to pull some of the hot air out. I bought one for $15 from a local shop. Vantec also makes hard drive cooling fans that you attach to the bottom of the drive for about $15...not sure how effective they are though.

If you have the money you could always go with liquid-cooling, too...all kinds of options there but they can be tricky to set up and, like I said, the good stuff isn't exactly cheap.

If I were building a new system and heat was an issue, I'd probably go with the Lian-Li V1000 like Llama advises. It comes with two 120mm fans standard and space for a 3rd 120mm.

 

[Erssa]

Why not use those hitachi drives in raid5?

 

[Zepper]

From the first time I saw a pic of the inside of this case design (not sure if it was the Silverstone or the Aerocool version - Enermax and one or two others now have one too), I knew that the air-flow pattern was all screwed up.
. You should have gone for the Silverstone Berserker instead. Have fun modding...

.bh.

:moon:

 

[The Boston Dangler]

The problem isn't just exhaust. Silverstone specs the 80mm intake fan at 25.5 cfm. That's not nearly enough to cool a system (minus the CPU tunnel) I would at least try the rig without the tunnel in place before cutting any metal.

 

[imported_BIOSMonkey]

Well, I solved the problem.

I went by Microcenter today to see what they had in the cooling department. I knew I had seen some gizmos that take up a card slot and have a couple of fans on them for cooling. But, most of these have the fans permanently mounted so the airflow direction is in the opposite direction from what I need.

Well I found one by Logisys called the 3D Edge Fan (part cf108). It installs like a PCI card (ie it takes a slot) but nothing actually plugs in to the slot...it has clips that go around the outside of the slot. It has 2 fans that can mount on the bracket, plus another bracket that can be installed 90 degrees from the main one.

The thing that got my interest was that the fans could be screwed into the bracket, so I knew I could direct the airflow upward. It also has blue lights which match my lighting.. 🙂

Well, it worked like a charm. I installed the fans, and plugged it in to the last PCI slot so the fans were practically right under the drive cage. I sealed the case, booted up and ran 3dmark03. I pulled the side off and touched the drives....barely even warm. HUGE difference.

The fans were a bit whiney turned in this direction, since the intake side is supposed to be next to open air and the blow side is criss-crossed with metal supports. So out came the metal supports and noise gone 🙂

In addition to the new fan, I also rerouted the SATA and power cables, because they were all smooshed together at the back of the drives against the back case panel. I think this helped a good bit too - since it allowed some airflow to come into the back sides as well as the front.