[lug] combatting hard drive heat

Sean Reifschneider jafo at tummy.com
Mon Feb 24 05:04:05 MST 2003


On Sat, Feb 22, 2003 at 11:36:22PM -0700, D. Stimits wrote:
>What I'm wondering is if anyone knows of some extremely thin heat sinks, 
>perhaps 2"x2" or 4"x4", that might fit on the side of this cage, between 
>the cage and case wall? Or an extremely thin fan version of this same 

Well, first off you're probably going to have to lose one of the drives.
Cooling of the edge of one of these drives is probably going to be
insufficient if it's also absorbing the heat of two other drives packed
directly above and below it...  Move that drive elsewhere to give the
other two drives space for airflow?

What I'd be tempted to do is remove that other drive, as it probably
isn't so useful...  It can't be that useful, I've never even heard of it
-- I think you called it a "floppy"?!?  Anyway, remove that and re-drill
the cage so that you can separate the 3 drives by a little space.

The real issue is getting air-flow to that space, it sounds like you
have inadequate levels of air moving through there.  A fan in front, if
there's cooling vents in the case up there, could help...

There are some very small heatsinks for use in 1U rackmount cases.
You'll probably need 4 to 12 of them to cover the surface area that
you're talking about, depending on how much coverage you want and if you
want to get both sides.  At $30 each, two of them will cost as much as a
40GB IDE drive that probably performs better and has much less heat to
dissipate.  It looks like I got them at gtweb.net, but they don't seem
to list them on the web-site any more.

Sean
-- 
 You think your Commodore 64 is really neato.
 What kinda chip you got in there, a Dorito?  -- Weird Al
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995.  Qmail, Python, SysAdmin



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