Worry about the HD?

[FerraraZ]

I'm going to take on the scary task of liquid cooling. My hard drive bracket is in the front however and I'm not sure how I would want to cool them or if I even have to worry about them. I've got two 500gb Western Digital's spinning at 72000 rpm (only one hard drive is really used). I could keep the front 120mm fan in the case but I really was hoping to go fanless with this improvement. i'm not going cheap with a liquid cooling kit so I dont want to cut it short.

 

[MustISO]

I always use active cooling on my hard drives. I've never had one go bad in all the year doing this. Maybe I've just been lucky. Even a low RPM front fan is better than nothing.

 

[zagood]

You shouldn't go completely fanless unless you're liquid cooling the ram, mosfets, NB and SB as well. You need at least a little air movement for those. If only keeping one fan, stick with exhaust, but using a lowspeed intake and exhaust would be the best call.

-z

 

[FerraraZ]

So your saying to keep an exhaust fan on the back? I'm still worried since the hard drives are in the front that they'll generate too much heat. I haven't found a good water cooling kit that gives me all the options of cooling.

 

[zagood]

Why don't you do this to check...enable SMART monitoring in your bios, install SpeedFan or another utility to check your HDD temps, then turn off your front intake fan while leaving your rear exhaust fan on. If your SMART temps get over 55c on a regular basis, then you'll need that front fan when you switch to water.

-z

 

[BlueAcolyte]

You need airflow anyway to cool the motherboard components and RAM, it's impossible to have a passive watercooling system.