Interesting! I always thought the PSU *did* cool the case a bit.
No, the person who told me this was an engineer at the shop who sold me the
PSU; when I took it back thinking it was faulty because my HD was getting very
hot, he said this.
LOL. The only fan in my old 486 was the ps fan. Didn't even have a
heat sink on the cpu
Not sure exactly what you mean by "airflow path": the HD is in the usual place
in an ATX case, and the case is closed. (There is only one HD now: a Maxtor
200gb 7200 rpm SATA V drive)
Usually there are holes in the case in front of the 3.5 bays behind
the plastic front cover. If you have enough case fans blowing out,
and you tape up all the excess vents, you can get some decent airflow
over the hard drives sometimes. Some people punch out bigger holes
there too.
A new development: I've added a new fan at the fan slot inside the front of
case, oriented so that it sucks cold air *into* the case.
The HD heats up more slowly now, but still reaches 60+ centigrade eventually.
(after an hour and a bit).
Better to move your hard drive to a five inch bay with those 3.5-5
adapter rails and mount a fan below it blowing up to cool the bottom
of the hard drive. You can order fans on 5" installation frames for
this cheap. Check out the case mod retail websites.
That should take care of the hd problem.
Do you know what is considered the maximum safe temp. for HDs before you risk
reduced lifetime and failure?
Should be a thermal spec at each mfg's website.
I was looking for info the other day and found this pdf, but it's for
some Western Digital SCSI drives using SMART technology. Gives you an
idea of what they're worried about. Looks like 60-65C is the warning
area for that particular drive.
Yeah, you should be concerned.
The new thermal monitoring feature has been implemented in the WD
Enterprise WDE18300 and WDE9180 Ultra2 SCSI hard drives. This new
technology focuses on system-level protection and monitors the
temperature of the drive, providing pertinent information to the host
and modifying drive behavior as needed to protect the drive from
damage.
The first thermal threshold the customer threshold, is entirely
user-defined and programmable in Mode Page 0 (default value 60C).
A disable bit allows the customer to disable this specific threshold
in cases where other thermal monitoring notifications are desired but
no customer threshold is set. When this threshold is crossed, the
drive returns a 01/0B/01 error code (Warning–Specified Temperature
Exceeded). This threshold can provide a warning before the temperature
becomes critical. The results can indicate an event to be logged, user
intervention requested, or supplemental ventilation required.
The second thermal threshold the shutdown threshold, is not
programmable by the customer. (Figure 2 compares both thresholds the
customer and the shutdown.) This threshold is set at 65C, the
temperature at which the drive should be shut down to prevent
damage or reduced service life.
Upon reaching this threshold, the drive returns a 01/0B/80
error code (Vendor Unique: Warning–Drive should be shutdown due to
over-temperature condition). On the first temperature reading over the
shutdown threshold, the thermal polling interval is set to read the
temperature again in three minutes. If the temperature is still over
the threshold and spin down is enabled in page 0 by the Enable Thermal
Spin-down (ETS) bit, the motor is spun down. A Start Unit command is
required to spin up the drive again.
