Do Harddrive coolers work?

Yes, they do work but you're not going to notice too much other than if you touch the drive with your hand. The payoff for HDD coolers is in drive longevity. The longer they run hot, the sooner the chance will be of a >>potential<< hardware failure. I personally like the bay coolers that draw air from the front of the 5.25" bay (you may be using these anyways but I thought I'd mention it).
 
If I have to highlight the text, it's the wrong colour.

What temps are people getting with their hard drives? Mine sits at ~29C chillin' in XP, according to the S.M.A.R.T. utilities.
 
RickyJ said:
If I have to highlight the text, it's the wrong colour.

What temps are people getting with their hard drives? Mine sits at ~29C chillin' in XP, according to the S.M.A.R.T. utilities.
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if you have a fan on it thast usually what youll get

if there is no active cooling over a drive you can expect 50C+ :eek:
 
Reason I'm asking is currently and for quite some time I've had a case with fans blowing over the harddrives. Cause I'm installing a water cooling system I have to move the hard drives to a place less accesable to a fan. So I figured I would see about passive cooling. If they work Cool. I'll see if I can pick some up cheap somewhere. Thanks, oh and sorry about the blue.
 
Well using one of these would put the hard drives in your 5 1/4" drive bays and with a little modifcation you actually can put fans there. I have used this Zalman passive cooler before and it works ok, but would perform even better with some sort of fan blowing across it. Forgot to ask, what type of hard drives are you cooling?
 
kronchev said:
if you have a fan on it thast usually what youll get

if there is no active cooling over a drive you can expect 50C+ :eek:
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Ouch. I moved my HD from the HD rack to a floppy bay so my front fan would feed more air towards my video card.

I got a thermal diode for a cheap DMM of mine (the diode reads 37C under my tongue, so that should be accurate enough, eh?). I was testing the temps of my components when I was running 225x10 on my Barton 2500, and the HD body showed as 29-30C, so the S.M.A.R.T. sensor isn't far off. :cool:

I imagine my HD gets hotter under load though.
 
killernoodle said:
I have never heard of a hard drive suffering a heat related falilure. You dont need that thing.
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And you won't hear of many heat-related failures either. Like I said, heat will usually affect the "lifespan" of the hardware within the drive. Bearings, lubricats, actuating arms, even the reading head can be affected over time by heat. Don't forget that a hard drive still needs access to outside air (and the reading head actually floats on a thin layer of air). Heating that air (by heating the surrounding components) will affect the head performance and distance to the platter. Now we're talking about very small amounts of change here but the issue I'm talking about takes years to make a difference. Hard drives wear out over time anyways. Running them at higher temperatures will only speed up that process.
 
image-hdc502a.jpg


i'm using the vantec hard drive cooler it just screws on to the drive
before without it i was reporting some higher temps like almost in the 50c's
and now i'm getting a weird temp of 1 degree below the room temp (somehow)
 
personally don't really see the point of hard drive coolers because if you check the rated thermal characteristics of most drives, the temps you're experiencing fall WELL within their rated operation.

cheers,

dave
 
these work better as a vibration dampener than a hard drive cooler. get something with a small fan on it. or two fans.

oh, yeah, an obligatory "my eyes! my f*cking eyes!!! why oh why did you use that color?!?!?!"
 
dave_graham said:
personally don't really see the point of hard drive coolers because if you check the rated thermal characteristics of most drives, the temps you're experiencing fall WELL within their rated operation.

cheers,

dave
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Your CPU can handle temps of up to and beyond 60C, not that I'd recommend running it at those temps for sustained periods of time.

Hard drives only benefit from the extra cooling. They may not need it, exactly, but it will help them live longer. Mine sit right behind one of my front intake fans and at room temp they run at about 26C each. The rest of my computer may be a couple Cs warmer, but it's worth it to have the hard drives cool.
 
the color he originally posted in isn't that hard to read...its hard to read if you hilite it though.

alright im interested, so what hdd cooler should i get for a 160 gb sata 7200 rpm seagate ?

also, how loud is this? http://svc.com/vanhddcool.html (i believe that's the vantec suggested above)
 
Not to noticable. I've seen some of the active coolers but since I'm building this box to be a "DISPLAY" and "ATTENTION" grabber. I like the looks of the passive coolers.

And for the record MAXTOR drives are heat pumps. Thus I now use Seagate 7200.7 120GB SATA drives now.
 
cool thats exactly the kind of drive im getting basically...

er did you throw a few colored letters into your post or do i need to stop drinking?
 
CompMage said:
Not to noticable. I've seen some of the active coolers but since I'm building this box to be a "DISPLAY" and "ATTENTION" grabber. I like the looks of the passive coolers.

And for the record MAXTOR drives are heat pumps. Thus I now use Seagate 7200.7 120GB SATA drives now.
Click to expand...

Which Maxtors? My 80GB Diamondmax Plus9 cruises cool all day long. After coming down from a long gaming session, the temps are still cool.

Nice colours CompMage. :D
 
I also have two vantec coolers just like the one in the picture. They do cool down your harddrives, but those little tiny fans start making some mad noise after a few months. I had a different no name brand of a similar style before these and the same thing happend. I would go with the fanless zalmans.
 
HDD coolers are probably a good idea for 10k+ rpm drives, but 7200 rpm drives are fine without them.
 
Nobody really noticed that harddrives get higher access times as soon the drive heats up? :eek:

My seek times are about 1 to 3mSec higher when ive got my HD-Fans off..

Drive cage is right behind the two lil 80mm fans.
maxcase3.jpg
 
I've noticed that most of the heat from my drives (Seagate 7200.7 Plus and WD1200JB) comes from the bottom, where the circuit board resides. I just have an case intake fan blowing over the bottom of my drive, and MBM reports that the 7200.7 is around 30C. I don't see how that Zalman HD cooler will help, it just grabs onto the side of the HD and tries to take some heat off the drive's enclosure. Either that, or I'm missing something.
 
Personally I use hd coolers....I have an 80mm case fan in front of the hds in 2 of my systems, 2 big @$$ 5 1/4 bay sinked--6 40mm fan (total) having bastids for my raid array & the Vantec (pictured above) for my wife's WD 120JB. They were all relatively inexpensive compared to the price of the hd and the integrity of my data. They may or may not be that crucial, but , @ very least, they do no harm. If they do prelong the life of my drive & perhaps save a drive from failing & thus a situation wherein I could lose everything (esp. w/ the RAID)---it's a small price to pay---for some degree of peace of mind, if nothing else. ;)
 
Even if that Zalman cooler could get the heat out of the hard drives, I don't know how it could dissipate the heat. Heatpipes transfer heat but they're not very good at dissipating it in to the air (that requires surface area), but that Zalman cooler has no fins on the heatpipes from what I've seen. So how can it possibly do much good?
 
For $5 more you can get the Vantec Vortex which has a variable speed fan which you can leave on low or off for quiet computing.

http://www.frozencpu.com/cgi-bin/frozencpu/hdc-19.html

I bought mine for only $25 though. It's kinda expensive at Frozen CPU for $39 but I suppose that's average price. Mine was on sale.

I personally use this for my Raptor but I actually bought it because I loved the orange/red LED temperature display readout (like your clock radio) which is unlike all those others which are LCD readouts which are washed out and hard to read because they are front or back illuminated with black text.

It just looks so damn cool and it's functional. I don't need all these extra fancy fan controls or firewire headers that the other display units provide. I just replaced the thermistor (which is supposed to be connected to your harddrive to monitor temperature) with a longer one and attached it to my CPU touching the core.

vortex.jpg

(Yes that's my core temp unfortunately...but hey, my CPU fan is at <900 RPM for silent computing, I turn it up when I play games).

Here's the guts of it:
10000RPM.jpg

It uses a crossflow blower. The blue pads are vibration dampners that the drive sits on, you screw it on from the bottom. My computer is also sealed off from outside except for the exhaust fans and powersupply and key areas where I've installed air filters on intake so the Vortex is also a key area for cold air intake just due to the nature of the lower pressure inside the computer. That way, it will passively draw in fresh air over the harddrive even if I turn the crossflow blower off. That's another advantage being that you can turn the fans off if you want. Like many others have said, if there is no fan on the Zalman, it will sit in a dead spot of air inside your 5 1/2" bay and it will do no good other than by slow radiation of heat and not air dissapation and the heat will just build up.
 
64 damn man be careful. AMD suggests that most non mobile chips will melt at about 75, some lower

i would be terrified to go past 60 especially if you are OCing
 
Mizugori said:
64 damn man be careful. AMD suggests that most non mobile chips will melt at about 75, some lower

i would be terrified to go past 60 especially if you are OCing
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Yeah, I'd try to get some better cooling on there if you're concerned about keeping it quiet because 64 is too much.
 
I'll throw in my opinion about hard drive cooling. I originally built my pc about 3 years ago with no intake, just the psu fan for outtake, heh. I kept it like that for about a year. In that year 2 hard drives failed on me. One was an IBM Deathstar, so that we won't count you could say, but the other was a Seagate Barracuda IV.
Since then I have bought a new case and put an intake fan right where the 2 seagates I have are. It has been 2 years I believe, and no failures. I wouldn't say that zalman thing is really needed, but yeah keep a fan on it or something. Where is the heat going to go with a giant heatsink or heatpipe attached to the hard drive?
 
Justin218 said:
I'll throw in my opinion about hard drive cooling. I originally built my pc about 3 years ago with no intake, just the psu fan for outtake, heh. I kept it like that for about a year. In that year 2 hard drives failed on me. One was an IBM Deathstar, so that we won't count you could say, but the other was a Seagate Barracuda IV.
Since then I have bought a new case and put an intake fan right where the 2 seagates I have are. It has been 2 years I believe, and no failures. I wouldn't say that zalman thing is really needed, but yeah keep a fan on it or something. Where is the heat going to go with a giant heatsink or heatpipe attached to the hard drive?
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Same power supply and everything when you switched cases?
 
rayman2k2 said:
it cant beat this color
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I got you beat :p
(select the above...)

and as for hard drive cooling, the ones that draw air from the front of drive bays own. I got a cheap antec one with 3 tiny fans drawing in air. I can't even feel any heat when I touch the drive.
 
killernoodle said:
I have never heard of a hard drive suffering a heat related falilure. You dont need that thing.
Click to expand...

Each 10°C (18°F) temperature rise reduces component life by 50%.
Conversely, each 10°C (18°F) temperature reduction increases component life by 100%.
the Arrhenius equation
http://www.shodor.org/UNChem/advanced/kin/arrhenius.html

applies equally to mechanical and semiconductor components
and is a rule of thumb only (additional variables impacting a specific senerio)
and obviously could be taken too far especially given thermal contraction and expansion in a mechanical device

but accelerated wear from elevated tempertures in a HDD is common knowledge
its like not changing the oil in your car, eventually the bearings will wear out
sooner rather than latter
 
Here is my suggestion:
HDD must be cooled decently. The hard mounting of HDD helps on temps a lot since most of heat is evacuated through side of HDD and transferred to case. However, this introduces vibrational noises, etc. Once you lose the side contact to case (just leave the HDD outside case and use it (like ghosting), you will notice the temperature starting to reach uncomfortable range even in ambient temperature. (I see a lot of thermal recalibration sound on my 180GXP In particular if I do that) Now that you have to move it to 5.25" bay, here are few others things to look at.

http://www.lian-li.com/product.php?action=viewPD&prdid=1193

http://www.coolermaster.com/index.p...&other_title=+STB-3T4-E1+4-in-3 Device Module
 
Mizugori said:
64 damn man be careful. AMD suggests that most non mobile chips will melt at about 75, some lower

i would be terrified to go past 60 especially if you are OCing
Click to expand...

64C is a tad warm...but your cpu won't melt. ;) AMD states a max temp of 90C for </= the 2100 & 85C for 2200 & greater. So if that's an accurate reading you have a bit of headroom b4 meltdown. I have seen 60C a few times w/ the on-die sensor w/ my Asus boards...and the socket reading would be like 39C or 40C!!!
 
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