John@Smith.com wrote:
> John Corliss wrote:
>
>> But back to the hard drives, I'd like to find something that will mount
>> so as to suck the hot air right off of the hard drives and out of the
>> case. I would prefer not to use something that will suck the heat off of
>> the hard drives and distribute it into the case, but maybe that
>> additional fan in the 5.25" empty bay will render that concern of no
>> consequence. Any recommendations?
>
> Yeah Ive noticed 7200 drives get pretty hot. Thats why I always leave
> some space between them. That seems like the minimum you should do.

I totally agree.

> Most of the people I know as Ive mentioned and on my systems --- HDs
> hardly ever fail physically that is.

I've now had a Maxtor fail after only three years and this most recent,
a Seagate, fail after only 8 months. Heat *must* have been a factor
involved in these failures.

> But Ive been using cooling and
> spacing them apart and most of PCs from people I know their systems
> are modest so they only have one HD so there arent two or 3 of them
> all crammed into a small space.
>
> There are probablly all kinds of cooling systems but Ive only seen 3
> main ones around here. One is particular to my style of Antec case.
> Antec and maybe some others have 3.5 inch drive cages where you can
> stick a standard 80mm fan in the front of the removable cage. So its
> easy to face it in or out - blowing in or out. Ive only seen it on the
> full tower Antec cases.

That is a good idea. I could fabricate a mount using a piece of sheet
metal and mount the fan directly behing the drives.

> The others are the belly pan with two dinky fans. All these are 10
> bucks or less at COMPUSA and many other places. I think they blow air
> in though Im not 100% sure. You might be able to mount them in the
> other direction. I cant remember how they are mounted but I assume
> they are with screws. The problem with the belly pan is they take up
> space.

Right. That's why I kind of ruled them out. I only currently have space
to mount two hard drives internally and that arrangement would take up
the space of one hard drive, limiting me to only one (although cooled)
hard drive.

> On my system if I use the HDs in the 5.25 slots the belly pans
> take up a fair amount of vertical space so that I cant space them the
> way I normally do and it reduces the amount of drives I can install.
>
> http://www.compusa.com/products/prod...662&pfp=BROWSE
>
> The other popular one is the 5.25 slot faceplate that has two tiny
> fans built in. I assume you can remount the fans outward to blow out
> but I dont know. You can find those everywhere even Compusa.
> http://www.casecooler.com/514slothardr.html

That is what I will be using in conjunction with the hard drive cooling
solution I come up with. It will help greatly to cool my DVD drives.

> (clipped)
> There are lots of variations Im sure - ones with heatsinks too that
> cost way more and jackets with fan cooling etc. Theres those pull out
> cases for the 5.25 slots like this with fan cooling
>
> http://www.circotech.com/rm-133w.html

Heatsinks work best with a fan on them. The 5.25" pullouts would place a
drive directly between my DVD drives and heat them up more.

> If you are a noise freak then Zalman makes one for the HD thats
> noiseless but have no idea if it works.
>
> http://www.casecooler.com/zahehadrco.html

The pipes are just heat sinks. I was reading a review on the unit and
one guy had to add a fan.

> Heres another interesting one that takes up one whole drive slot
>
> http://www.casecooler.com/lahadidrco.html

I was looking at one of those on the Newegg site. However, it's not as
effective with systems having two hard drives. As I mentioned in another
reply to this thread, I did find this setup:

http://proline.com/tech/stacker/index.htm

which I will be looking into.

Thanks very much for your reply.

--
Regards from John Corliss