[lug] combatting hard drive heat

[D. Stimits]

Sean Reifschneider wrote:

> 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?

Cabling makes this very difficult. Add to that the need for 5 1/4" bay 
adapters. I'd like to move the floppy, but then the floppy cables 
available are not long enough to get to the 5 1/4" bays. Perhaps one of 
the drives can move, but the cable for that scsi channel will have 
problems reaching drives decentralized into two locations.

>
> 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.


It is useful, though I agree it is an abomination. It is useful because 
this will be a multi-boot system (windows, either 98 or NT 4, RH 7.3, RH 
8.0, Debian, and perhaps Mandrake), and my 98 CD pre-dates bootable 
CDROMs. My NT 4 CD is bootable, but it pre-dates adaptec AIC7895 scsi 
drivers, and they must be provided on floppy. Linux has no problems at 
all dealing with this machine, whereas windows is a ^&**#*$ pain. If it 
worked out, I'd also consider adding a FreeBSD boot to it.

[side question: anyone know if FreeBSD can use Linux swap partitions?]

>
> 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...

I guess back when the case was made they didn't expect lots of heat in 
the 3 1/2" bays. 3 of the 4 bays have removable plugs/covers, designed 
to be removed when a floppy or other front-accessible device is added. 
No vent. The fourth bay in that 3 1/2" bay cage doesn't have anything at 
all. The saving grace is that it is a metal cage that makes somewhat of 
a heat sink all by itself, though it is obvious something has to change. 
The part that isn't obvious is how to make that change given cable 
lengths and avoiding spending much money on it. Anything I've purchased 
so far is useful in expanding any future "bare bones" type system, so it 
isn't a total loss (and I really want to keep this dual cpu board w/ SCSI).

>
> 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.

Yeah, that's too much to spend. One reason I want to stick to SCSI is 
that I have these cheap drives already, there is no more cash outlay (I 
did pick up 2 of them earlier for $20, but compare that to the price of 
a new 40 GB IDE). SCSI is superior to IDE when it comes to booting with 
older systems that can't see beyond the 1024th cylinder...I can put a 
linux "/boot/" partition almost anywhere, it won't care. I have a KRUD 
8.0 boot partition working now way beyond cylinder 1024. And since I 
only want this multi-boot environment for packaging/compiling/browser 
testing, I don't care that they are not all that big. 4 GB partitions 
are ok, and in many cases I can share some, e.g., I have two really old 
4.5 GB drives that will be going into a striped software RAID, and 
mounted on /usr/local/ of all of the linux boots.

So far, the floppy and heat are my only constraints to getting it finished.

D. Stimits, stimits AT attbi DOT com