Yuna

Firstly some common-sense tips on looking after your hard drives before we get into the cooling and monitoring section:

#1: Be gentle with hard drives: don’t drop them, leave them lying around (where they could get knocked off a desk, squashed, stepped on, etc)
#2: Don’t push the hard drive cover down.
#3: Treat the IC’s on a hard drives controller like you would RAM and don’t touch them. Hold the drive by its metal chassis and just as you would when touching any internal computer component ground yourself first by touching the metal on your case or use a wrist strap.
#4: Don’t cover the pressure regulation holes (which are marked “Don’t cover” anyway…)
#5: Never pull the data or power cables out of your hard drive while the computer is turned on - unless of course the drive is hot-swap capable. Don’t run the drive with only one of the two plugged in, either.

Cooling and Monitoring:
Hard drive cooling is often overlooked. Most modern hard drives produce a lot of heat, though many people don’t even think about cooling their hard drives. This guide will give you ideas on how to keep your drives cool, monitor your drives by using S.M.A.R.T, and I’ll explain the benefits of doing these.

Let’s take a look at the different kinds of hard drives common today, generally the more electrical power (watts) they use (as seen in the disks specs sheets) the hotter they can get:

5400RPM drives: These (usually older) hard drives run cooler than their newer counterparts but may still get quite hot, though usually they don’t require dedicated cooling.
7200RPM drives: I recommend these drives have some kind of active or passive cooling as they can get very hot especially when there is little ventilation near them.
10,000RPM+ drives: These high performance drives can get extremely hot. I recommend cooling for all 10,000RPM and higher drives.

So how hot is your hard drive getting? You might already know that all modern hard drives contain a temperature probe built-in. Many people are un-aware of this because you need 3rd party software to access this temperature probe.

These 3rd party programs convey the temperature (and much more information too) data by using a technology called S.M.A.R.T - which stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology.

Some programs that can access S.M.A.R.T data are:

• Speedfan
• Motherboard Monitor 5 (temperatures only, enabled in preferences)
• Drive Health
• ActiveSMART
• SMART Disk Monitor
• HDD Health

…and many more which can be found with google.

Install one of these programs, and take a look at your drives temperatures. Any higher than 45 degrees C while idle or more than 50 degrees C when under load (defragging, disk checks, and disk heavy programs/utilities) is in my opinion cause for concern, and will likely reduce the life of the drive.

Most of the programs can also display lots of random, confusing data or “attributes”. These can give warnings as to if there is a problem developing with the drive, for example if your Read Error Rate or Write Error Rate went to 95% (attribute = 5) then you’d want to start backing up all your data ASAP. Many of the dedicated hard drive monitoring apps such as Drive Health, ActiveSMART etc, have algorithms that ‘intelligently’ predict when your drive will fail, however I’ve found these to be extremely inaccurate and their predicted fail dates vary wildly (especially when the program is first running and its determining the drives average attributes, which takes many days/weeks). Still if you know roughly what to look for in the attributes and have a rough idea of what they ‘usually are’ you can decide for yourself if the programs ‘Your hard drive will die next Monday’ warnings are really warranted or not.

For more information on S.M.A.R.T and the attributes, a great article further explaining the subject can be found here.


Cooling options:
So what options are there to keep your drives cool? Most of you will probably think ‘STICK A FAN ON IT!’ which does work but there are even more basic things to consider, such as how you’re mounting the drives in your case.

All cases have 3.5” hard drive mounts. The problem is these are often in cramped parts of the case where there is little ventilation. If you’re using those (ugly) grey PATA ribbon cables then your airflow will be even more restricted near the drive.

The part of the drive which is most important to keep cool is the controller board.

Many new cases have fan mounting points next to the drives at the front of the case, which are good, but even then it should be noted that you should not stack disk drives on top of each. “Sandwiching” drives on top of each other will make them run a lot hotter even if there is a fan blowing across them, as there is less surface area to dissipate heat. Also the top drive mount point may have a sheet of metal at the top, which will also reduce (or completely stop) any airflow getting to the top of the drive. If you have the room, simple leave a mounting point empty between each drive.

Most large computer stores and case modding shops will have some hard drive cooling products. There are many different options such as:

• 3.5” hard drive cooling fans
• 5.25” hard drive passive HDD coolers (using heatsinks or heatpipes)
• 5.25” hard drive active coolers (have a fan and may have heatsinks/heatpipes too)
• 5.25” enclosed hard drive coolers (these have a fan and an intake/exhaust vent and often have LCD screens with temperature readouts)
• 5.25” hard drive cages (mount multiple 3.5” hard drives in 2 or 3 5.25” drive bays, often have a fan and some have vents)
• 5.25” water coolers (Yep, even hard drives can get some water cooling lovin’)

In the end if you choose to buy some dedicated cooling for your hard drives the choice will come down to available space, noise, style/look, and the size of your wallet.

Summarizing:

1. The cooler a hard drive runs the longer the life it should have.
2. All drives faster than 5400RPM should have good airflow blowing on them and/or dedicated cooling such as heatsinks, heatpipes, fans, or even water cooling.
3. “Sandwiching” hard drives is bad.

drummer4lifex

Nice FAQ! Rep+

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mattlb0619

yea, nice FAQ! rep+

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Le_Loup

Fortunately the waymy hd's are setup, even though on top of each other, 1 has a fan directly aiming at it, (the under belly of it, :) ). And the other one, has... :( a floppy drive on top of it :O . Hehe, I am thinking of removing 1 of my 2 dvd drives (one is a dvd burner, the other, a cdrw/dvd read combo drive). So that I can fit in a 5 1/4 cooling system there. The more airflow the better overall.

My hd's run anywhere between 25-35 celcius at most (idle/load) So i'm pretty impressed at that. The lower hd that has the fan directly near it, is the cooler of the 2. Fortunately gateway designed it with the 2nd hd "holder" to be placed left to right of the case, instead of standard. :)

Le_Loup

noxious89123

The i-Cages in my armour are great for cooling my HDD. The frame of the i-cage is metal so it helps conduct heat away, and initself acts like a heatsink, and because the drive is in the middle of the cage, air blows over the top and bottom surfaces.

25c Idle 35c Load :)

EDIT: Its a 7200rpm WD Caviar (SATA)

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gonX

Good that you point out the obvious, since i know alot of people who doesn't know about this.

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