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Hardware Hacking Data Storage Hardware

Hard Drive Cooling for 10 Cents 420

Posted by CowboyNeal from the easy-fixes dept.
David Tiberio writes "I've bought many hard drive cooling solutions over the years, sometimes spending $50 or more on drive cooling systems that were noisy and did little to cool down the drive. After much tinkering, I discovered a simple solution that cost me only 10 cents per drive... the 1/2 inch bracket. Mounts any 80mm fan to the belly of an internal hard drive."
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Hard Drive Cooling for 10 Cents More

Hard Drive Cooling for 10 Cents

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  • 10c? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ElPresidente1972 ( 95949 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @08:40AM (#12322208)
    Fan not included, I take it?

    (first post?)

    • Re:10c? (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You have to take the fan out of the power supply to put on the hard drive bracket and then swap the case fan with the power supply fan because your power supply is over-heating and then go out and purchase a case fan because your system is getting too warm.

      So essentially. the hard drive fan is free. It is the case fan that costs you some dough...

    • Re:10c? (Score:5, Funny)

      by brunson ( 91995 ) * on Saturday April 23, 2005 @09:30AM (#12322421) Homepage
      I found a way to get huge performance increases out of my Saturn for only 5 dollars.

      I take this $5 towstrap and attach it to the back of this Viper... suddenly my 0-60 times are are cut in half and my mileage is through the roof!

      Thanks, Slashdot.

    • Re:10c? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by heavy snowfall ( 847023 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @09:39AM (#12322461) Journal
      No, but he's happy to tell you where to buy them.

      Approximate quote from TFA: "you can buy fans here ( http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-1651435-54502),
      This is just another case of Roland Piquepaille... Check out the top level of his domain too, it's just an ad site...

      1. Create site about obvious hack with refferer commision links.
      2. Post your site on high volume site like /.
      3. Profit.

      4. Piss me off for wasting my time. I even wasted my time typing this up, I'm sure some "people have a right to profit" dude will mod me down.

  • Thanks (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 23, 2005 @08:40AM (#12322209)
    Did we really need an article on Slashdot to figure this one out? ;-)

    • Re:Thanks (Score:3, Insightful)

      by huber ( 723453 )
      No. But thats the beauty of slashdot.

    • Re:Thanks (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 2TecTom ( 311314 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @09:13AM (#12322364) Homepage Journal
      Were you doing it? No, I thought not. Evidently then, yes, yes we did need a /. article.

      Actually, it's a clever hack in the true sense of the word, so yes, it's even somewhat approriate given the audience.

      Oh, and I've seen a lot worse from the /. tyrants. Democracy is such a great thing, it's just too bad we're never allowed to actually have it.
      • This is not a clever hack. As others have pointed out, this will cool the PCB, which is not where the heat is. The heat is in the drive mechanism itself; you cool it by cooling the sides and top of the case. The best way to accomplish this short of lapping the sides of the drive and attaching heat sinks (this would be the best option, probably) is to simply have one or more fans blowing air from the front of the drive to the back. My case has "room" for about eight 3.5x1" drives, and I have two installed, w

    • Re:Thanks (Score:3, Funny)

      by kfg ( 145172 )
      Just wait until you see the next story, which extolls the incredible power of . . . string.

      KFG
      • Just wait until tomorrow, when you see *this* story again.

        And for good measure, again on a week from Tuesday . . .

        :)

        hawk

  • only 10c for a bracket. Oh and a fan. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 23, 2005 @08:42AM (#12322216)
    Uhh that sounds like Microsoft costing.

    MS: "We can help you serve customers for only 10c a day!"
    Manager: "woohoo. Approved!"
    MS: "So your bill is $36.50 for the first year, plus $899 site license, plus $299 Windows licenses for each CPU plus $1599 service contract plus...."

    • Re:only 10c for a bracket. Oh and a fan. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Deagol ( 323173 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:22AM (#12322656) Homepage
      (I think that the article was worth while, and I'll personally take ths simple idea into account when trying to rig a new box on the cheap.)

      But back to the parent post...

      It *is* kinda funny, the 10-cent claim. I read a lot of those backwoods and country living kinds of managzines. They're usually full of great projects that the average person can usually pull off to some degree.

      What kills me is often the low-cost claims: "Build a central, forced-air wood heating system for only $10 !" Sounds really cool, until you read the article and find that the person already had a house's worth of air duct on-hand, an arc welder, and a friend who gave him enough plate steel for the furnace in exchange for a dozen eggs and a case of beer. :)

      These articles are still great, as they illustrate the make-due-with-what-you-have mentaility. However, a little truth in advertising would be appreciated. :)

      • I have never met anyone that expressed a need to specifically add cooling to their hard disk in the first place. Hard disks come factory sealed and if one is overheating it is defective or absorbing heat generated from other sources, like maybe a hot CPU. Cool the CPU.

        Or is he overclocking his disk from 7k rpm to 14krpm somehow? Don't get too close to that machine.

        Is this guy selling a solution to a frictional problem or a fictional problem? Shheeeez.

  • Wow. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chess_the_cat ( 653159 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @08:43AM (#12322222) Homepage
    Who knew you could attach things to other things using a bracket and screws? Thanks again Slashdot.

    • Re:Wow. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Who knew you could attach things to other things using a bracket and screws? Thanks again Slashdot.

      Most of us (excusing those few who statistically show up all the time and can't manage to tie shoelaces).

      What most of us mightn't have realised is that a cheap & nasty solution works so much better for its intended job than some of the pricey (but flashy!) fixes.

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by AtariDatacenter ( 31657 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @08:44AM (#12322228)
    Your data called.
    It wants the integrity of its magnetic field back.

    • Re:In other news... (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Stop spreading urban legends. Magnetic fields no more hurt a HD in reality than they hurt humans (and yes, a large magnetic field can kill a person, but you don't get those from HD fans either).

      Also, newer fans don't emit any magnetic field at all, as they don't use electric motors
      • Tell that to these guys [magnetechcorp.com]

      • Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

        by pegr ( 46683 ) * on Saturday April 23, 2005 @09:26AM (#12322406) Homepage Journal
        Also, newer fans don't emit any magnetic field at all, as they don't use electric motors

        I give up... Hampters?
      • Ok.
        1st, youi are right, you need more than a little motor to damage the data on a hd. A LOT more.

        But... The rest of you posting is more than a bit stupid:
        How strong to you think a magnetic field would be to damage humans? A NMR uses 2-4 tesla without problems, and the only reason you dont tune than higher is that we cannot without wasting tons of energy/contruction cost. We currently cannot produce stable magnetic field that would damage human tissue (in our university, we have one of the strongest NMR in

        • Also: please show me the fan that uses a non electic motor. I REALLY wanna see it.

          Go to the airptort and look at the things hanging off the wings. They are all fans powered by non-electric motors.

          Of course they might be a bit noisy for your computer case.

      • No I'm sure they spin using fairy flux.

      • Re:In other news... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by FUKUSHU ( 878381 )
        You sir are retarded. and I quote "newer fans don't emit any magnetic field at all, as they don't use electric motors" WTF do you think make the fan blades spin?! telekenisis?! A strong feeling that it'll work?! The only difference between modern fans and old stile is that the "motor" is on the fan itself instead of in the middle with the fan mounted on a rotating drive shaft. What's really wrong with people now a days? do they not teach anything in school anymore, or is our society doomed to being ruled by

    • Re:In other news... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @08:52AM (#12322274) Homepage Journal
      The magnetic field produced by a small DC fan might not be enough to faze the platter. It takes a magnetic field of a certain strength to make a change in the data bits.

      I have a few Compaq Xeon workstations that placed the drives transversely in front of the system power supply so cooling air can pass between the drives. I have yet to see a problem. It's designed to cool 15k RPM drives very quietly. The PSU fan itself is a slower 12cm fan, placed on the intake of the PSU, only a few cm away from the drive's edges. It's very quiet for a PC, and very impressively quiet for a system with a 15k RPM drive in it.
      • a small DC fan

        Doesn't 2000rpm fan produce 2kHz electromagnetic wave regardless of the current?

        • Re:In other news... (Score:2, Insightful)

          by dan42 ( 740934 )
          I think the magnetic field would oscilate proportional to the number of stators times the RPM... and of course there are harmonics.

          There could also be much higher frequency EM emmisions depending on it's make-up (eg. PWM switcher for speed control).

          But I'm sure neither of these are as intense as the 10,000 RMP high curent motor that spins the platters.

    • Re:In other news... (Score:5, Informative)

      by neverpsyked ( 578012 ) <atakins.gmail@com> on Saturday April 23, 2005 @09:34AM (#12322438) Homepage
      A boss of mine who used to work for Air Force Intel told me that the magnetic field used to de-gauss an HDD had to be about as strong as a car-lifting magnet. I seriously doubt that the field generated by an 80mm fan is even enough to penetrate the steel housing of the drive (maybe not even the circuit board, since it's bottom-mounted).
    • I've been doing this for a while now (I just used cover plates on each side with holes drilled in them instead of a bracket), and I'm sure that the dinky field put out by a fan is nothing compared to the super strong magnet present in the hard drive itself.

    • Induced currents (Score:2, Interesting)

      by ScrappyLaptop ( 733753 )
      A few readers have pointed out that the magnetic field from an 80mm fan is probably nowhere near strong enough to penetrate the metal platter cover, let alone affect the bits on the platters themselves. Then one reader mentioned that if the fan was mounted on the underside, it would have to go throught the PCB as well. Can a fan motor induce enough current in the PCB traces to cause data errors (or CRC-type errors and thereby slow down data transfer)? What about all those fancy-but-cheap (look, it's UV

  • Good for one drive but ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by black_rock ( 871751 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @08:44AM (#12322229)
    what about when you have several drives or a tiny case?

  • Yeah! (Score:5, Funny)

    by ArAgost ( 853804 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @08:44AM (#12322233) Homepage
    *This* is top-grade engineering! This could be used to cool down spacecraft re-entering earth atmosphere :|

  • Such an innovation! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by tinrobot ( 314936 )
    Why didn't anyone think of this before?

    Oh wait... every geek in the world has done this, or something close to it. I've used all sorts of hardware store parts to mount fans inside cases as have hordes of other geeks over the decades.

  • Classic case of a measurement mistaken for reality (Score:5, Insightful)

    by arivanov ( 12034 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @08:46AM (#12322246) Homepage
    Well... Most S.M.A.R.T. temperature sensors are on the PCB and they are measuring PCB temperature instead of the internal drive temperature.

    Hence, a fan under the disk makes a lot of difference while making very little to make your data safer.

    A 3x 40mm fan battery in front of a drive or a pressed enclosure that cools the actual package holding the platters makes a lot of difference there while not chaning the S.M.A.R.T. reading by more then a degree or so.

    It is up to you - what do you want. Show (a good reading) or substance (good temperature of your drive platters and heads).

    • Re:Classic case of a measurement mistaken for real (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RubberDogBone ( 851604 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @09:12AM (#12322361)
      Yeah. LOL. It's not the PCB that gets hot anyway, at least not on my drives.

      The heat is in the disc, the drive motor, and related surfaces. Some of them can get quite hot. I still have some (working!) giant SCSI bricks that get hot enough to burn flesh.

      Full height 5.25 drives that would burn fingers and break your foot too, if you dropped it. I think it weighs close to 10 pounds. It'd probably still work after the fall but it only holds 1 gig or something. Not worth a bother.

      Anyway, I cool my drives with a 120v turbine fan that blows sideways across the whole drive. The air cools the disc side and the PCB side. Works great. Doesn't tax the system PSU.
      • can you explain why to blow air onto the HDD, instead of of blowing the air away?

        I bought some HDD coolers myself, and I thought that blowing air away is better, hence I don't know why I thought that.

        So what are pros and cons of blowing air in one direction or another?
        • For what it's worth, try holding your hand in the airflow of a fan some time. It feels a lot stronger on the side the fan blows on to compared to the one the fan sucks the air from. Obviously, the same amount of air has to be blown out as sucked in, but blewn out air is accelerated in a certain direction giving it more power. It's not that much of a difference, anyway - people who experiment with switching on their CPU heatsink/fan typically end up with only a few degrees of temperature difference. Most mod
        • Sure.

          Do you have a fan handy? Any sort of window fan or table fan will do, or even one of those 80mm computer fans.

          Power it up and aim the air at your face. You should feel a cooling effect, maybe even a lot of cooling if it's a strong fan. Move the fan away a little. Distance decreases the effect but it's probably still noticable, right?

          Now turn the fan around. No effect at all at a distance. Move it closer. Still nothing. You're going to have to put your face right up next to the fan to feel an
        • The other replies to your question are good.

          But there's more to the answer than they realize.

          Let me start with a story...

          At my first job about 10 years ago, I wound up helping out at the IT department of a cellular phone company (no, a real cell phone manufacturer, not a service provider). One of the first tasks I had was to replace the CPU cooling fans on a few Sun desktop workstations. At the time, these Sun systems were incredibly expensive - about $40K each if I remember correctly. That, coupled w
      • I've done this to one of my drives, and I blow on the PCB. Why? Because when you think about what typically fails on a HDD, it's the controller. Keep the electronics cool, the drive will last longer.

      • Re:Classic case of a measurement mistaken for real (Score:4, Informative)

        by YoungHack ( 36385 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @11:40AM (#12323169)
        I have been lead to understand that drives don't typically fail because their platters got hot. They tend to fail because their circuit boards fail. You'll find advice all over the internet suggesting that you try to fix a broken drive by swapping the circuit board from another of the same model before purchasing expensive data reclamation.

        In that context, this fellow's solution doesn't seem so irrelevant. Keeping the circuit board cool is likely to lengthen the life of the drive.
    • Quoting the article: "Please note that in some cases I suspected that the drive temperature was not being reported properly, as some drives showed no change in temperature via software but were clearly cooler to the touch." I assume he touched the metal around the actual platters and not the (powered) drive electronics. I doubt a 3x 40 mm fan battery will be more effective than this, in fact it'd probably be more noisy at the same amount of airflow/cooling. It's not like his setup only cooled the PCB.

  • Vibration (Score:5, Informative)

    by darkwiz ( 114416 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @08:53AM (#12322280)
    If you decide to go with this kind of setup, try to make sure you use a fan with low vibration (well balanced, low speed). The last thing you need with a hard drive is more vibration. The drive head is only flying a few hundred molecules above the drive surface.

    It may not amount to much as the vibration needs to be of the right frequency to be really bad. But it is probably better to err on the side of caution with drive lifetimes already being as bad as they are.

    I personally use a 120mm fan that is mounted on rubber pegs, perpendicular to the hard drives, but not mounted to the drives themselves. This way, less vibration is transferred to the drives.
    • The drive head is only flying a few hundred molecules above the drive surface.

      Are we talking water or beta-galactosidase molecules here? ;-)

  • HD Cooling? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MankyD ( 567984 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @08:55AM (#12322285) Homepage
    I've seen a few HD coolers. This seems to work alright.

    My question is - why? I guess I've never really heard of anyone over-cloking there hd's. Do they really overheat? How can you tell? When should you worry about it?

    • Re:HD Cooling? (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > Do they really overheat? How can you tell? When should you worry about it?

      Yes. Touch them. Now.

    • Re:HD Cooling? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 23, 2005 @09:03AM (#12322320)
      Some 7500RPM or higher drives that aren't well engineered can overheat in small spaces.

      I personally had a Western Digital 80gb harddrive overheat and cause errors in a normal midtower. (Several of my friends had the same problem with the same model)

      Since then my addage is if it's 7500rpm or higher put some fans on it. Since that realization I've had no problems.
    • Run your PC for a while, then stuck your tongue on it..

      HD's do run hot.. And hot reduces lifespan.

  • call me silly.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by zakezuke ( 229119 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @08:55AM (#12322287)
    ... but would it not make more sense to either

    1. mount a 90mm fan on the front of your 3.5 inch bays.
    2. mount a 120mm fan on the front of your 5.25 inch bays.

    This way you actually get airflow for 2 to 3 drives rather than blocking airflow with another damn drive.
    • I am doing something similar.

      I lost 3 large IDE hard drives in 6 months... I lost a 120, a 160 and 200 to disk failures in 2 different computers. I started paying more attention to the drives and I realized that ~all~ my drives were quite warm to the touch.

      I added fans (80mm or larger) to either blow in the front of the case, over the hard drives, or I put the fan behind the drives to blow air over the drives. Forward or back doesn't seem to matter, but mount the fan perpendicular. This way one fan can m

    • I agree.
      My PC has 5 Hotswap bays that are cooled with a single 120mm fan in front. As i dont use 15k scsi stuff, even 7V are more than enough to keep all drives cool without much noise or wasted space.

      This solution otoh wastes a drive bay and doesnt create a directed airstream... it will just suck in its own heated air again.

  • Now Slashdot has to tell me what case designers have know for ages? Hmmm...maybe that's why my case has a fan right next to the hard drive.

    Must be a slow news day...
  • Thought everyone did stuff like this when they wanted to keep their hardware a while..
  • Did you see the state of that fan in the article? Smothered in dust and fluff. I'd give it another week's life before it starts making a noise. It'll only make that noise for a bit though, and then after that it'll be really, really quiet. Because it will have stopped.

    If you're putting together a server that relies on running cool, dont skimp on your ${LOCAL_CURRENCY} by recycling cruddy fans from your old 486 boxes!

  • More noise ! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bushboy ( 112290 ) <lttc@lefthandedmonkeys.org> on Saturday April 23, 2005 @09:07AM (#12322344) Homepage
    I've got a fan in my PSU, over my GPU, my CPU.

    It already sounds like a bloody helicopter and now you want me to spend 10cents making it even louder !

    Wow !
    • I've got a fan in my PSU, over my GPU, my CPU.


      It already sounds like a bloody helicopter and now you want me to spend 10cents making it even louder !

      Wow !

      Unless the fan you add to cool your harddrive is louder than your CPU fan, which is unlikely if you choose the right fan, the perceptible amount of noise outside the case will not increase. Try it.
      • None of my case fans (all running at 5V) is louder than the PSU fan, but the whole system is still more silent when I turn them all off. The same goes for the CPU fan.
    • I used to do all sorts of this stuff. Extra fans, zip tied to the side of video cards, cutting holes in my case and mounting blowers...

      Then I got smart. I bought a nice light aluminum Antec Case [newegg.com], with 2 120mm fans (front and back), and a very quiet PS [newegg.com] with 1 big fan. I yanked out my SCSI RAID array and bought a 10K rpm SATA disk. I would have been happier with a bit less bling on the case, but it works.

      Losing the RAID array didn't slow anything down, since it's a workstation, not a server. But I can h
    • It already sounds like a bloody helicopter and now you want me to spend 10cents making it even louder !

      Trust me, if you have a normal 4000rpm cpu fan you're not going to notice a dinky little 2000rpm 80mm fan esp if you have a GPU fan.

  • Woah! I was so close! (Score:5, Funny)

    by orionware ( 575549 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @09:25AM (#12322402)
    I was mounting the fan on the OUTSIDe of the case. I was alot cooler but that damn drives kept getting hot! I was so close...

  • Heatpipe coolers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Richard_J_N ( 631241 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @09:35AM (#12322443)
    I find this sort of cooler much more useful:
    http://www.quietpc.com/uk/harddrive.php#z m2hc2

    The heatpipes per se only make a small difference to the temperature (perhaps 6-10 degrees?), but the rubber mounts do a fabulous job of reducing the noise.

  • Come on SLASHDOT!!! GRRRRRRRRR (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ServeYourWorld ( 762879 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @09:36AM (#12322448)
    This is obviously just a ploy to make some money. The guy has an affiliate link to PCMALL. He is hoping some people click and buy some other stuff along with the screw. Can we get back to real news?

  • Top 5 things wrong with this setup... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by toofast ( 20646 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @09:54AM (#12322535)

    1. Running 2 drives as RAID-1 with a spare souunds less efficient than just running RAID-1 for the OS partition and RAID-5 for the data. RAID-5 is faster for writes than RAID-1, but RAID-1 offers protection for the boot OS

    2. One fan per drive seems inefficient, and it will increase the power consumption of the box as a whole - not including the wasted space.

    3. Mounting a large fan with one single bracket would make the fam vibrate and not be mounted in a sturdy fashion

    4. The title doesn't include the cost of the fans. If he has three drives, three fans, three brackets, we're looking at about $20

    5. All these extra fans brings us back to the age of the noisy PC. So passé.

    My suggestion? A good Antec case with proper ventilation holes at the front and a 120mm fan at the rear. If you have three or more drives, add an 80mm fan at the front, blowing air on the drives in the same direction the air is pulled in from the 120mm. It's not the low temp of the drives that matters, it's air circulation + consistent temp.

  • Be Careful (Score:5, Funny)

    by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:11AM (#12322617)
    I also tried mounting a fan to my hard drive with an angle bracket. I found out that you need to be really careful about how deep you drill and tap the mounting holes into the drive.

    I used 1/2-inch deep holes, and the drive wouldn't even fire up when I tried to boot. It turned out that the drive had really flimsy construction, and they had moving parts right under the surface that were immobilized by the screws. The cheap POS wouldn't even work after I took the screws back out.

    If you plan to do this, I'd recommend using very short screws; probably no more than 1/8-inch.

  • Instead of just arranging the components in a way that doesn't let excess heat build up, we're making the system use even more power to push air around in an enclosed space. This is not how you make a more efficient system. If your hard drive is that hot, you're using the wrong chassis. Get one designed with airflow in mind. Put a heat sink on the hot components, or, better yet, figure out why they're turning so much of the power they draw into heat instead of something useful. Recycle your old chassis. No

  • A better idea... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Eyeball97 ( 816684 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:41AM (#12322744)
    You don't need a fan.

    All you need is the blade from an old fan, a toothpick, and a 2mm drill.

    1. Drill a hole in the drive directly above the platters
    2. With some superglue on the end of the toothpick, insert it in the hole so that it sticks to the spindle
    3. Glue the blade to the other end of the toothpick.

    Now you see, no need for a fan. As long as your drive's running, the fan blade you just installed will be spinning at 5400 (or whatever rpm) your drive is.

    Much cheaper than $0.10.

  • better to put the fan on the side. then you can use one fan to cool more than one drive.

    I have a 80mm fan right now cooling 4 ide drives and it brings the temps down about 10-15 degrees C. They run about 35-37 degrees C as opposed to almost 50 degrees C without it.

    pretty basic hack really. I don't see the point in making a WHOLE slashdot article about it. Maybe someone out there just went, "Hey, what a GREAT idea." but I bet that person already tried to dunk their drives in ice water.

  • New book about this (Score:3, Interesting)

    by KrackHouse ( 628313 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @11:06AM (#12322929) Homepage
    An MIT prof just released a new book that you can read online [mit.edu] called Democratizing Innovation. I haven't read the whole thing yet but it looks like he may be on to something. Also see Pro-Am Revolution [demos.co.uk].
  • I hate when people make you download a 972x914 pixel, 129703-byte image, then hit it with width=400 height=376 attributes in the tag. Reducing the image itself would have reduced the size by about 2/3rds.

    Grrrr!

  • This is stupid. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by JustNiz ( 692889 )
    HD's dont need cooling. I've never cooled my HD's and not ever had a HD problem in 20+ years I've had a computer.

    This cooling fad is just another way of companies selling you expensive crap you don't technically need (such as fans with leds).

    The author is probably one of those people who pay 200 bucks for gold speaker cables too.

  • BIG MISTAKE: Use only nylon straps as brackets. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @01:11PM (#12323796) Homepage

    Big Mistake in the article: Use only nylon straps as brackets. A metal strap conducts the fan vibration to the hard drive.

  • Cools the circuit board and thermistor not platter (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kriston ( 7886 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @03:44PM (#12324639) Homepage Journal
    This is a great idea if all you needed to do was cool the circuit board. The fans don't effectively cool the platters, though, and sometimes that thermistor that tells you the temperature is mounted on the same side as the circuit board, getting cooled by that fan, and showing you lower temperatures, but the platters are still running hot.

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