heat sinks on hard drives

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chrisb71
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heat sinks on hard drives

Post by chrisb71 » Thu Jul 29, 2004 7:53 am

I was thinking, I have some heat sinks on the way, generic copper fins. I was thinking what if I used arctic epoxy to stick them onto the hard drive bottom (the front half of the bottom is all bare metal). I realize I'd probably have to sand down the metal somewhat, since it doesn't seem very smooth.

I was thinking this because I have 2 HDDs, and can't put them in 5.25" cooler type units, but they are isolated via silicone strips from the 3.5" bay, so they tend to get warm.

I have various plans I'm working on to make sure there is airflow over the HDDs to help.

Let me know what you think.

sthayashi
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Post by sthayashi » Thu Jul 29, 2004 8:02 am

Watch out that you don't seal up any breather holes. Some hard drives have them exposed in weird places.

A bigger question though is how hot is your case temperatures? Because your hard drive is not going to get any cooler than those case temps, and depending on the drive, it already runs that cool.

BTW, WELCOME TO SPCR

swivelguy2
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Post by swivelguy2 » Thu Jul 29, 2004 8:03 am

Welcome to SPCR!

If you do some searching, you'll see that this has been discussed several times before.

Off the top of my head, I recall that the place to put HDD sinks for best heat dissipation is along the sides, rather than on top and bottom. Unless you've got some really fiery drives and/or bad airflow around them, heatsinking HDDs is usually overkill, although it may be a good way to add mass, dampening high frequency vibration.

Edit: darn, you beat me to it, sthayashi.

chrisb71
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Post by chrisb71 » Thu Jul 29, 2004 8:22 am

Hi thanks,

Yeah I can't put side heat sinks on since I don't have 2 open 5.25 bays (well I have one open bay, but I'd rather be symmetrical and have both cooled the same way :-). But I thought the side is the same as the bottom if the bottom is not covered by a card, since it looks to me like one piece of metal? (the card only covers the back half of the drives).

I just figured an easy way to cool them without modding my case would be, (I have a Silverstone LC01) to open the 2 front 3.5 bays and have air flow in there (with filters in front, and weatherstripping to make sure air doesn't come in somewhere else) and have the HDDs right there.

Would two open 3.5" slots be enough intake? (the side air vents got covered by sound dampening material).

I have a Digital Doc 5+ on the way, so I guess I could wait and measure temps to see if that is good enough, I am just impatient and want to finish my changes. I haven't even been able to use my pc yet, I'm so busy playing around with components! :-)

mathias
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Post by mathias » Tue Aug 03, 2004 1:12 pm

I'd also like to put heatsinks on my harddrives. I though the best place to put them would be on the parts of the sides sticking out of the drive cage. I don't think I have enough airholes around the harddrives, I moved the beeper/speeker out of it's slot to use it's holes for airflow(at which point I happened to notive it's magnetic, which worried me), but I think a new hard drive above the Cuda 4 I have will need some extra cooling. However, I'm worried uneven cooling could be dangerous, anyone know if that could bee true?

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