How effective are HDD cooling fans?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jackpine
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Jackpine

I was reading up on various cooling fans for hard disk drives, and wa
wondering if anyone has any experience that they would like to share.
In particular, I was looking at the Vantec V13-1002, which has tw
fans, 24cfm, and screws onto the HDD

Are these things effective, or a waste of money (not just the Vante
V13-1002, but these types of coolers in general)
 
Jackpine said:
I was reading up on various cooling fans for hard disk drives, and was
wondering if anyone has any experience that they would like to share.
In particular, I was looking at the Vantec V13-1002, which has two
fans, 24cfm, and screws onto the HDD.

Are these things effective, or a waste of money (not just the Vantec
V13-1002, but these types of coolers in general)?
Click to expand...

If the onboard sensor can be trusted, it's taken my 250Gb Maxtor from
50C down to 26C.
 
Jackpine said:
I was reading up on various cooling fans for hard disk drives, and was
wondering if anyone has any experience that they would like to share.
In particular, I was looking at the Vantec V13-1002, which has two
fans, 24cfm, and screws onto the HDD.

Are these things effective, or a waste of money (not just the Vantec
V13-1002, but these types of coolers in general)?
Click to expand...

Considering all the cheap fans included with many products, I would
worry about what would happen to the drive temperature if the fans quit
running. Maybe it would be better to simply have a separate fan blow
over the HD.

Years ago, I found that the hottest chips on a 7200 RPM HD would cool
down by 10-20 Celcius if any air at all blew over them, and even
mounting HDs vertically would do this. So I hang my HDs from the
bottom of the drive cage, which also lets a front case fan blow on them.
 
I have a Vantec VTXC01BK hard drive cooler it's the size of a cd rom drive
and the hard drive sits in side it and then the whole thing fits where
a cdrom drive would go. And yes it does make all the difference, my hard
drive was running at about 45 to 50 c now it runs at 28 to 31 c
 
Based on the last three posts, I would say that these types of cooler
are very effective
 
Jackpine said:
Based on the last three posts, I would say that these types of coolers
are very effective.
Click to expand...

Anything that moves a decent volume of air across the drive is
effective. But it seems rather excessive to have a separate cooler for
each drive since a properly designed and implemented case will do the
same thing for every HD installed in it. I've got 5 HDs in an Antec
Sonata II and none of them runs much above ambient temperature. I have
added the optional 12cm fan to the side of the drive cage and that
dropped the temperatures a few degrees and it is running at its lowest
possible speed. This is because Antec was sensible in the design and
spaced the drives apart by a good 15mm, left the sides of the cage open
to airflow, and ensured that ambient air being sucked through the case
by the main 12cm exhaust fan in the rear passes directly over the drives.

And yes, most of "heatsink with fan(s)" coolers will work and I have
used them on systems with 10K and 15K SCSI drives which seem to want to
get to barbecue temperatures during normal operation. But the little
whining fans they used certainly didn't help make an office quiet enough
for thought.
 
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