Anyone seen fans on CDRW drives?

JWarrior · Post by **JWarrior** » Sun Mar 23, 2003 12:05 pm

As I slowly go about quieting down my computer, I'm finding new parts that are taking over the title of loudest component in my system.

It's now my CD burner, a Yamaha (CRW8824E). This burner has a little tiny 25 mm fan in the back. As far as I can tell the only purpose that this little fan serves is to generate noise. I can't imagine that it's producing much airflow or cooling the CDRW drive particularly well at all.

This particular drive is a 8x8x24 writer. Most newer drives (40+ speed writers) run with no fans right? I think i'm going to unplug this fan, but just wanted to know if anyone had any experience with Yamaha (or any other) drives with fans.

powergyoza · Post by **powergyoza** » Sun Mar 23, 2003 12:11 pm

I once had a Panasonic CW-7502 SCSI 4x burner/8x reader. It had a teeny fan too. I didn't notice the noise at the time, but then again nothing was quiet in that day and age. At the time people actually thought the fan was an advantage.... who woulda thunk it?

I never unplugged the fan though. Might not be worth it for you.... I assume a new burner is outta the question..

attnet · Post by **attnet** » Sun Mar 23, 2003 1:33 pm

Especially when you can get a new 48x+ nowadays for almost free, if you're clever about it.

SometimesWarrior · Post by **SometimesWarrior** » Mon Mar 24, 2003 2:32 am

powergyoza wrote:I once had a Panasonic CW-7502 SCSI 4x burner/8x reader. It had a teeny fan too. I didn't notice the noise at the time, but then again nothing was quiet in that day and age. At the time people actually thought the fan was an advantage.... who woulda thunk it?

I never unplugged the fan though. Might not be worth it for you.... I assume a new burner is outta the question..

I've had that same CD-R drive for years (cost me $325 back in 1997, IIRC), and it's now in old machine back with the parents (where I am too, for a week's vacation). That little fan, which never bothered me back then, got unplugged today. I'd like to take it out completely, but it looks like that would require demolishing the drive.

If the drive fails, fine, I'll get a new burner. If it can't survive without its teensy fan, it doesn't deserve to live.

Although maybe I shouldn't be so hard on it, since it's burned hundreds of CD's over the years without problems. But I could never even feel the air coming out of the back, and the ventilation "holes" cover almost all the usable airflow space. The drive feels a bit warm to the touch, whereas my other CD drive feels like the rest of the case. I never gave the drive a touch-test with the fan plugged in, but I'll give it a try the next time I reboot.

Post by **Ralf Hutter** » Mon Mar 24, 2003 5:28 am

The older CDrw drives had hotter running chipsets inside of them. By the time they were getting to around 12x to 16x they were running the cooler chipsets and got rid of the fans.

Chris Ochre · Post by **Chris Ochre** » Mon Mar 24, 2003 1:11 pm

My Plextor 161040A used to have a fan, which sounded horrible - it wasn't even a consistent sound, so I took it off and have had no problems since.

So I'd say get rid of it.

JWarrior · Post by **JWarrior** » Mon Mar 24, 2003 3:14 pm

I'm gonna try to get an idea of how hot this drive's chipset is currently before doing anything, but if it's reasonable in temperature, I think I'm going to do like SomtimesWarrior and just unplug the fan and see what happens. Hopefully all will be well, but if the drive dies, it'll be an excuse to go buy a new one.

Chris Ochre · Post by **Chris Ochre** » Mon Mar 24, 2003 3:57 pm

That was my reasoning. If it works, great. If not then bah, I'll buy a better one.