too many hard drives?

ethebubbeth

Golden Member
May 2, 2003
1,740
5
91
My case is a chenbro junior, and it has 2 external 3.5" bays and 3 internal. The two externals are already taken up by a floppy drive and a flash card reader... I currently have two hard drives in the internal bays and am wondering if it would be safe from a cooling standpoint (i know hard drives run very warm) to add a third, filling all three bays. There is a panaflo 80mm L1A intake fan in front of the drive cage, but it barely moves any air because it's behind an aluminum mesh filter (very dusty where i am).

My intended setup is follows:
2 raptors in RAID 0
1 7200 rpm pata drive for mass storage

Your thoughts?
 

beatle

Diamond Member
Apr 2, 2001
5,661
5
81
Got any room in a 5.25" bay? 3.5" brackets are cheap and would let you to upgrade and keep a space between the drives.

If you have a REAL warranty (3 years) on your storage drive and a good backup plan, I wouldn't have a problem running 3 drives next to each other.
 

EeyoreX

Platinum Member
Oct 27, 2002
2,864
0
0
You will be fine. IDE drives don't get so hot that your drives will "fry" before you have replaced them. In my file server box I have 4 hard drives in the 5 drive "bay" Two are about a year old. Two are about 5 years old. They have always run side by side, with relatively cheapo fans. These drives are constantly on, and have been for the past 5 years. You'll be fine.

\Dan
 

nageov3t

Lifer
Feb 18, 2004
42,808
83
91
I work with Cobalts at work... reluctantly, I should add. they put the crap in Crappy McCrap servers.

anyways. they use IDE drives and have minimal cooling. while we've had plenty of CPU problems due to the servers overheating, we've never had any drive failures because of it, even in the boxes where we've crammed 2 hard drives.

I think you should be OK, but I'd second the advice about upgrading your fan, just in case.