keeping drives cool in a MicroATX case

[Dan Lenski]

Hi All,
I have recently added a second SATA HDD to my Linux workstation, which is
housed in a very standard microATX case. The processor is a low-power
Athlon X2 and stays at a reasonable 35-37°C with stock heatsink and fan.

I noticed that the HDDs are pretty hot, 44 for the older one (root
partition) and 42°C for the newer one (/home partition) under very low
usage (the computer is a small-scale web server too).

I'm trying to figure out the best way to keep these drives cooler. I have
read that HDDs should stay under 40°C for maximum reliability. I've tried
software tricks, such as enabling spin-down after 1 minute, enabling
advanced drive power management for the newer drive...

Those don't seem to make a difference, so I think I need some physical
cooling in there. I already have an empty bay in between the drives, on
the theory that this will allow them to radiate heat a little better
(maybe?). What is a cheap way to cool a couple of SATA drives *quietly*?
Should I put a case fan in between the drives and the front of the case,
blowing air towards the back? Should I get one of those fans that sits on
top of the drives? Any other tricks to try?

Thanks for any advice or pointers to reliable information!

Dan

 

[Arno Wagner]

Hi All,
I have recently added a second SATA HDD to my Linux workstation, which is
housed in a very standard microATX case. The processor is a low-power
Athlon X2 and stays at a reasonable 35-37°C with stock heatsink and fan.

I noticed that the HDDs are pretty hot, 44 for the older one (root
partition) and 42°C for the newer one (/home partition) under very low
usage (the computer is a small-scale web server too).

I'm trying to figure out the best way to keep these drives cooler. I have
read that HDDs should stay under 40°C for maximum reliability. I've tried
software tricks, such as enabling spin-down after 1 minute, enabling
advanced drive power management for the newer drive...

Spin-down is not a good idea, as non-Laprop HDDs are typically
only rated for 40'000 or so spin-downs. Wit 1 minute spin-downs,
you can kill your disk in a few months.

Come to think of it, one way would be to move to low-power
laptop drives.

Those don't seem to make a difference, so I think I need some physical
cooling in there. I already have an empty bay in between the drives, on
the theory that this will allow them to radiate heat a little better
(maybe?). What is a cheap way to cool a couple of SATA drives *quietly*?
Should I put a case fan in between the drives and the front of the case,
blowing air towards the back?

That would be the best option.

Should I get one of those fans that sits on
top of the drives?

This may or may not be enough, depending on the airflow
in your case.

Any other tricks to try?

Not really. Airflow is what you want, preferrably cool (i.e.
outside) air.

Arno

 

[Dan Lenski]

Spin-down is not a good idea, as non-Laprop HDDs are typically
only rated for 40'000 or so spin-downs. Wit 1 minute spin-downs,
you can kill your disk in a few months.

Thanks, Arno. I didn't think of that. Yikes, I'll disable the
spindown.

That would be the best option.


This may or may not be enough, depending on the airflow
in your case.


Not really. Airflow is what you want, preferrably cool (i.e.
outside) air.

Cool, I got an 80mm case fan for free, I think I'll try that out.

Do my temperatures seem unusually high? It is strange to me that the
HDDs are 6-8 degrees hotter than the CPU. Whereas at work I have a
very similar computer (except it's a slightly larger ATX case with a
single SATA drive) and the CPU and HDD are both at 36-37°C.

Dan

 

[Rod Speed]

Thanks, Arno. I didn't think of that. Yikes, I'll disable the
spindown.


Cool, I got an 80mm case fan for free, I think I'll try that out.

Do my temperatures seem unusually high?

Not really, but you dont say which drives they are model wise, or what the room temp is either.

It is strange to me that the HDDs are 6-8 degrees hotter than the CPU.

It is a bit unusual, but the cpu temp is lower than often seen too.

Whereas at work I have a very similar computer (except it's a slightly larger ATX
case with a single SATA drive) and the CPU and HDD are both at 36-37°C.

Clearly you arent getting much airflow over the drives in the home system.

 

[Arno Wagner]

Thanks, Arno. I didn't think of that. Yikes, I'll disable the
spindown.

Cool, I got an 80mm case fan for free, I think I'll try that out.

Do my temperatures seem unusually high?

Depends on the disks. For modern disks, I would say yes.
For older ones, not really. The surface coatings have gotten
better. The rule of thumb would be that on a hot day, the
disks should not go over 50-55C under load, that being the
typical maximum temperature for most HDDs.

It is strange to me that the
HDDs are 6-8 degrees hotter than the CPU.

CPUs are much, much better cooled.

Whereas at work I have a
very similar computer (except it's a slightly larger ATX case with a
single SATA drive) and the CPU and HDD are both at 36-37°C.

Lower room temperature? Better airflow? Newer disks?

Arno

 

[Daniel Lenski]

Not really, but you dont say which drives they are model wise, or what
the room temp is either.

They are:
* Seagate ST3200826AS (200gb SATA 7200rpm, 2005-ish)
* Hitachi HDP725050GLA360 (500gb SATA 7200rpm, brand new)

And the room temp I would estimate at 21°C (it's my air-conditioned
ground-floor bedroom ).

It is a bit unusual, but the cpu temp is lower than often seen too.

Yeah, this is a low-power Athlon X2 CPU (45W TDP) and I am using onboard
video and a fairly wimpy power supply, so nothing is putting out much
heat.

Clearly you arent getting much airflow over the drives in the home
system.

Right.

I tried a random case fan that I scrounged up, which seems awfully weak,
and I put it in front of the HDDs. It seems to do the job adequately:
both drives are running at 38°C now, even though there's no vent in the
front for air intake. So I hope that is good enough for me.

Thanks for the advice!

Dan

 

[Rod Speed]

Rod Speed wrote

They are:
* Seagate ST3200826AS (200gb SATA 7200rpm, 2005-ish)
* Hitachi HDP725050GLA360 (500gb SATA 7200rpm, brand new)

And the room temp I would estimate at 21°C
(it's my air-conditioned ground-floor bedroom ).

OK, thats a bit high with that room temp, essentially
because there is bugger all airflow over the drives.

Yeah, this is a low-power Athlon X2 CPU (45W TDP) and I am using onboard
video and a fairly wimpy power supply, so nothing is putting out much heat.

I tried a random case fan that I scrounged up, which seems awfully
weak, and I put it in front of the HDDs. It seems to do the job adequately:

Yeah, you dont need much.

both drives are running at 38°C now, even though there's no vent
in the front for air intake. So I hope that is good enough for me.

Thanks for the advice!

Thanks for the washup, too rare in my opinion.

 

[Daniel Lenski]

Thanks for the washup, too rare in my opinion.

Amusingly enough (or maybe tragically?), just a day after this post...

My coworker had a problem with his laptop hard drive which had developed
some bad blocks and would not boot. I strongly suspect thermal issues.
SMART shows a maximum lifetime temperature of 65 C (gaaah!!!!) and it was
running at 47 C while I was recovering data off of it. It's a kind of
ugly Toshiba laptop with a mobile P4 processor that sits right next to
the HD, which seems like terrible placement. And he's regularly left it
running overnight with no ventilation in our lab with lots of temperature
fluctuation and heavy equipment running nearby. There doesn't appear to
be any problem with the drive /per se/... it runs in the low 30s outside
of his laptop.

Thanks to GNU ddrescue, I was able to image pretty much the whole drive
and get his data off.

Dan

 

[Daniel Lenski]

Thanks for the washup, too rare in my opinion.

Amusingly enough (or maybe tragically?), just a day after this post...

My coworker had a problem with his laptop hard drive which had developed
some bad blocks and would not boot. I strongly suspect thermal issues.
SMART shows a maximum lifetime temperature of 65 C (gaaah!!!!) and it was
running at 47 C while I was recovering data off of it. It's a kind of
ugly Toshiba laptop with a mobile P4 processor that sits right next to
the HD, which seems like terrible placement. And he's regularly left it
running overnight with no ventilation in our lab with lots of temperature
fluctuation and heavy equipment running nearby. There doesn't appear to
be any problem with the drive /per se/... it runs in the low 30s outside
of his laptop.

Thanks to GNU ddrescue, I was able to image pretty much the whole drive
and get his data off.

Dan

 

[Squeeze]

Dan Lenski wrote in news:7fd5c914-431a-4e18-a231-79e4db406f20@s50g2000hsb.googlegroups.com

Thanks, Arno. I didn't think of that. Yikes, I'll disable the spindown.

Yeah, obviously spindown can only be set at 1 minute interval and the drive
will spinup every minute, again and again.

 

[Tom Stephenson]

Drives aren't all the same but universally it's better to keep them
cool. Most drives have a max temperature of 55C. Doesn't mean they will
fail if there is some short term problem and they go higher than 55 but
running then for an extended period beyond 40 isn't a good idea.

Generally, more airflow is better. But be careful about the fan(s). If
you run case fans at a full 12V you get maximum performance but minimum
[fan] life. I prefer bigger fans turning slower. Fans running high speed
provide more air but also vibration and hard drives are *very* sensitive
to vibration (some drives more than others).

I generally mount a larger fan in front of the drive cage and spin it at
some slower speed to get good airflow across the surface of the drive.

Some chassis designers provide a rubber isolation gasket for the fan.
That's really important to minimize vibration being transmitted to the
drive thru the chassis.

Also FWIW, newer drives consume less power. Much less. And if power
consumption is really important to you WD has a 'green' drive that cuts
way down on power (and performance) by turning 5400 RPM and slowing the
seek rate.


Tom S.

 

[Dan Lenski]

Drives aren't all the same but universally it's better to keep them
cool. Most drives have a max temperature of 55C. Doesn't mean they will
fail if there is some short term problem and they go higher than 55 but
running then for an extended period beyond 40 isn't a good idea.

Generally, more airflow is better. But be careful about the fan(s). If
you run case fans at a full 12V you get maximum performance but minimum
[fan] life. I prefer bigger fans turning slower. Fans running high speed
provide more air but also vibration and hard drives are *very* sensitive
to vibration (some drives more than others).

I generally mount a larger fan in front of the drive cage and spin it at
some slower speed to get good airflow across the surface of the drive.

Some chassis designers provide a rubber isolation gasket for the fan.
That's really important to minimize vibration being transmitted to the
drive thru the chassis.

Also FWIW, newer drives consume less power. Much less. And if power
consumption is really important to you WD has a 'green' drive that cuts
way down on power (and performance) by turning 5400 RPM and slowing the
seek rate.

Thanks, Tom. I am not too worried about the fan since it was just
something random I found lying around at my work, but will keep an eye on
it. I had heard about vibration issues, and am not sure what to do about
that. What model of lower-speed fan do you use or recommend?

The newer drive that I have is supposed to be quite good in terms of power
consumption, while the 3-yr-old drive not as good. I hadn't realized how
the WD green drives lower the power consumption... that's a pretty cool
strategy. I actually spent the summer working for Seagate (ducks) but
still have a lot to learn about how HDDs work in the real world...

Dan

 

[Dan Lenski]

Dan Lenski wrote in

Yeah, obviously spindown can only be set at 1 minute interval and the
drive will spinup every minute, again and again.

Yeah, I thought that sounded kind of funny, but then I tried it and found
that my drives keep spinning back up... at least they report that they are
in the "Active" rather than "Standby" state.

If I set spindown to 1 minute... they always spin back up within a few
seconds. This is under Ubuntu Linux and I'm not sure what the cause is.
Haven't had time to track it down yet :-(

Dan

 

[Rod Speed]

Drives aren't all the same but universally it's better to keep them
cool. Most drives have a max temperature of 55C. Doesn't mean they
will fail if there is some short term problem and they go higher than
55 but running then for an extended period beyond 40 isn't a good
idea.
Generally, more airflow is better. But be careful about the fan(s). If
you run case fans at a full 12V you get maximum performance but
minimum [fan] life. I prefer bigger fans turning slower. Fans running
high speed provide more air but also vibration and hard drives are
*very* sensitive to vibration (some drives more than others).

I generally mount a larger fan in front of the drive cage and spin it
at some slower speed to get good airflow across the surface of the
drive.
Some chassis designers provide a rubber isolation gasket for the fan.
That's really important to minimize vibration being transmitted to the
drive thru the chassis.

Also FWIW, newer drives consume less power. Much less. And if power
consumption is really important to you WD has a 'green' drive that
cuts way down on power (and performance) by turning 5400 RPM and
slowing the seek rate.

So does Samsung and they dont slow down the seek rate.

 

[Rod Speed]

Huh? When i set my SATA Seagate drives(a pair of 320 GB and a 750 GB drive) to
spindown they stay that way till either a system even occurs or i access them.

His was a sarcastic comment.

 

[Squeeze]

GMAN wrote in news:[email protected]

Huh? When i set my SATA Seagate drives (a pair of 320 GB and a 750 GB drive) to
spindown they stay that way till either a system even occurs or i access them.

No, Really? Babblebot wrong again?
"Wit 1 minute spin-downs, you can kill your disk in a few months"

[snip]

 

[Odie]

Rod Speed wrote in news:[email protected]

His was a sarcastic comment.

You sure?

 

[Arno Wagner]

Drives aren't all the same but universally it's better to keep them
cool. Most drives have a max temperature of 55C. Doesn't mean they will
fail if there is some short term problem and they go higher than 55 but
running then for an extended period beyond 40 isn't a good idea.

I have seen immediate failures in the temperature
range 70-75C. The drives worked again after cooled down.
I agree that <= 40C in normal operation is a good
rule of thumb.

Generally, more airflow is better. But be careful about the fan(s). If
you run case fans at a full 12V you get maximum performance but minimum
[fan] life.

refer to the fan datasheet for that. there are fans out there
that get >100.000 h lifetime under full speed, e.g. by SmattCooler
and Enermax. They are a bit more expensive though.

I prefer bigger fans turning slower. Fans running high speed
provide more air but also vibration and hard drives are *very* sensitive
to vibration (some drives more than others).

I have never had trouible with a HDD from fan vibration. Should
mot be an issue today, unless you have a very flimsy case.

I generally mount a larger fan in front of the drive cage and spin it at
some slower speed to get good airflow across the surface of the drive.

Some chassis designers provide a rubber isolation gasket for the fan.
That's really important to minimize vibration being transmitted to the
drive thru the chassis.

Also FWIW, newer drives consume less power. Much less. And if power
consumption is really important to you WD has a 'green' drive that cuts
way down on power (and performance) by turning 5400 RPM and slowing the
seek rate.

Hitachi also has a low power line and normal Samsungs asre also
pretty close to low power. In addition, if performance is less
of an issue, 2.5" notebook drives are an option. Most are at <2W
under load, whioch puts them at about 20-30% power of even the
low-power 3.5" drives.

Arno

 

[Arno Wagner]

Yeah, I thought that sounded kind of funny, but then I tried it and found
that my drives keep spinning back up... at least they report that they are
in the "Active" rather than "Standby" state.

If I set spindown to 1 minute... they always spin back up within a few
seconds. This is under Ubuntu Linux and I'm not sure what the cause is.
Haven't had time to track it down yet :-(

Ah, for Linux, you may want a laptop distribution or maybe
embedded distribution that minimizes disk access. There may
also be a setting in Ubuntu that allows it. One thing
is running swapless or with swap in RAM. Another is not
updating last access time-stamps on disk. The buffer flush
time can also be modified.

There are additional tricks to keep disks accesses that actually
involve the disk (and not just the buffer-cache) to a minimum.

Arno

 

[Jerry Peters]

Ah, for Linux, you may want a laptop distribution or maybe
embedded distribution that minimizes disk access. There may
also be a setting in Ubuntu that allows it. One thing
is running swapless or with swap in RAM. Another is not
updating last access time-stamps on disk. The buffer flush
time can also be modified.

There are additional tricks to keep disks accesses that actually
involve the disk (and not just the buffer-cache) to a minimum.

Arno

Take a look at linux/Documentation/laptops/laptop-mode.txt, or google
for something like "linux laptop mode". It's a script that sets the VM
system to reduce paging and remount disks with noatime.

Jerry