Hard Drive Air Cooling Questions

So, I just bought a new computer, and after a few years of being away, the mod bug seems to have bit me again.

It's a small case with a mini ATX board in it, so things are tight - and a little on the toasty side. I've got two hard drives and an ATI video card in there, so I need to help bring things down a little bit.

First and formost are those harddrives. What is the general consensus on HDD coolers around here? I have one spare 5.25 bay, and then the cage the two drives are in.


Right now, my thought is to get a drive-coversion HDD cooler for one (which? the one with the OS, or the one all of my games are on it?) and perhaps one of the pad style ones for the other. example:

Does this sound reasonable? If so, any suggestions on brands of either of the above?

Thanks, and it's good to be back!

Unless your Hard drives are getting hot enough to fail, there is little to no point in cooling them. Recent research has shown little or no improvement in performance or MTBF with cooled or non-cooled drives. You might want to consider spending your money on something else. Improving your CPU, Memory, or Video cooling is much more likely to provide real benefits over cooling your hard disks....

If, however you really want to go for it, bear in mind that smaller fans generally are noisier and less effective. Some kind of cage which holds, for example, a 120mm fan over 3 or more hard disks (such as thermaltake's iCage) will give you much more cooling and less noise.

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Originally Posted by slaveofconvention

Unless your Hard drives are getting hot enough to fail, there is little to no point in cooling them. Recent research has shown little or no improvement in performance or MTBF with cooled or non-cooled drives. You might want to consider spending your money on something else. Improving your CPU, Memory, or Video cooling is much more likely to provide real benefits over cooling your hard disks....

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I agree with this. You're better off improving the overall airflow throughout the entire case rather than just focusing on the HDDs. By keeping the ambient temp inside the case down your HDDs will be cooler anyway...along with everything else.

I'm with slave. The only time I've seen a HDD fail because of excessive heat was when I had 4 just piled on top of each other, running 24/7...and that may have been because the drive got shaken a lot bringing it back from the store, not because of the heat.. :whistler:

That being said, if you want to add more cooling to them, I would recommend shooting for as large a fan as possible since you're trying to bring the noise level down. Something along the lines of your 'Hard Drive Cooler' mod.

All: Thanks for the input.

Here's how it breaks down - My HDD cooler won't work, because I just don't have the space. LIke I said above, I've only got one spare bay. As for improving other components, they're really right where I need them right now, and the relative inexpensiveness of one of the cololer wouldn't gain me much placed elsewhere.

And, for the final point to address: I already had one drive fail and am waiting for the RMA. Now, it is very likely that it was just an out of box failure, rocked pretty hard in shipping, or something like that. However, it was pretty darn hot when I removed it after failure, and had been run pretty hard installing a bunch of software over those first few days. This is the main reason that I'm focusing on the hard drives at this point - insurance more than anything else.


This case is small, and there isn't a heck of a lot of room to improve the overall airflow. I'm thinking that I'm probably just going to buy a bay converter and hope for the best, I guess.

What case is it?

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Originally Posted by The_Crippler

This case is small, and there isn't a heck of a lot of room to improve the overall airflow.

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This IS a modding forum. ;) Do you own a drill? lol

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Originally Posted by x88x

What case is it?

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Wow...you people are on the ball today with the response time.

It's just the standard HP case. I plan to modify the side panel with a window and probably vent it some more.

I'm with the others on overall cooling, the video card is by far the hottest thing in any modern system. Improve that, get that heat out of the case, and everything else will improve. There are lots of aftermarket solutions, just be sure to look for something that will help get the heat out of the case, not just out of the card. (I use a Thermalright T-Rad GTX and love it, but it doesn't do a thing to get the heat out of the case.)

It's not as small as I was imagining. That looks to be about the same size as my tower. But mine has a plastic shell around it that adds 2-3" to each side so it looks bigger than it actually is. You might bust up your knuckles a bit trying to get everything situated but it's not as bad as working inside a micro-ATX case!
Are you having heat issues with it though?