hard drive heat damaging other hds?

  • Thread starter Thread starter FayeC
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FayeC

I had a 20GB western digital working well for 3 years. Then I got a 120 GB
seagate barracuda and added it to the computer.the catch: te two hard drives
were in the same cradle and very close to each other (almost touching).
A week later my old hd was diagnosed as dead after a nasty crash and
weirdbehaviour following.
I now exchanged the old 20GB with an older 4GB I had sitting around just to
get WIndows running so I can continue working on this computer until I can
get another hd. I then noticed that the new big hd heats a lot and I don't
have a secondary fan for the case.
Two questions:
Would adding a fan solve the heat problem?
How do people mount the hds in mid-size cases without running the risk of
damaging the hds?

Thanks,

FayeC
 
I had a 20GB western digital working well for 3 years. Then I got a 120 GB
seagate barracuda and added it to the computer.the catch: te two hard drives
were in the same cradle and very close to each other (almost touching).
A week later my old hd was diagnosed as dead after a nasty crash and
weirdbehaviour following.
I now exchanged the old 20GB with an older 4GB I had sitting around just to
get WIndows running so I can continue working on this computer until I can
get another hd. I then noticed that the new big hd heats a lot and I don't
have a secondary fan for the case.
Two questions:
Would adding a fan solve the heat problem?
Click to expand...

Yes. I have a desktop case that has a three-drive cage that contains
two 160G Maxtor drives stacked directly under a 3-1/2 floppy drive.
Using supervisor tape I stuck to the bottom of the case an 8 cm fan
that blows air at the drive cage from distance of about two inches.
The temperature of the drives when idle is about 102 degrees F.
Without the fan the drive temperature was almost 20 degrees higher.
How do people mount the hds in mid-size cases without running the risk of
damaging the hds?
Click to expand...

Mount the drives with adequate space between them so air can flow
above and below each drive. It's much easier with cases that have a
hard drive cage that goes all the way to the bottom of the case.
 
I looked and I don't think there's space between the two hard drives to fit
the cooler...
How about that system cooler (Turbo-Cool 2X)?
Would that solve the problem?
One good thing that I see in that is that it plugs directly into the power
bar and doesn't drain more energy from the computer's power supply......

FayeC
 
I looked and I don't think there's space between the two hard drives to fit
the cooler...
How about that system cooler (Turbo-Cool 2X)?
Would that solve the problem?
One good thing that I see in that is that it plugs directly into the power
bar and doesn't drain more energy from the computer's power supply......

FayeC
Click to expand...

In my experience the tiny crappy fans in the drive coolers die at some
point, and then you've got a hot disk, again. Measurement and alarms
are more usefull than fans. Alarms are important if fans are all that's
between cool and dead.

Find out what the manufacturer says is the upper limit for temperature
that won't shorten lifetime drastically and then knock that back a few
degrees, I use the 110DegF measured at the disk drive for machines I
care about.

I put a PC Power and Cooling audible alarm next to important
disks. Costs about $10US and makes a loud whistle if the temp goes
above 110DegF.

http://www.pcpowerandcooling.com/products/alarmandaccesories/alert/index.htm

Does SMART monitor disk temperature. I seem to recall that it does,
 
I just stick my hand behind the PC to see how hot/warm is the air being
blown out.
For newer hard drives, there may be software available for sensing the drive
temperature.

Western Digital's WD Bench does that but, alas, it does not run in Win 2000,
so I have to periodically boot to Win 98 to check drive temperatures.

There must be something out there that runs in Win 2000 that will check
drive temperature.
The drives are SCSI.
 
All 3 drives are SCSI.
WD Bench, in Win 98, reports the temperature for 2 of the drives, the 3rd
drive is not SMART.
This is a multiboot system, so it is same hardware as in Win 2000.

I have not tried Dtemp in Win 98.
 
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