Active Cooling Required ?

D

Darkatom

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 2, 2006
Messages
1,185
Is it necessary to have active cooling on hard drives, in my case they would be one 150gb raptor and a 320gb western digital. They are located in a ventillated area, so im kinda not sure if I need to have a fan underneath them.
 
I would say no. I have a Raptor 150 in a case with an 8800 GTX in it. No problem.
 
You don't need active cooling for HDDs. I'd only suggest it perhaps if they were really crammed in there with little to no airflow.
 
Active cooling is not required. In fact, I think it's outright retarded to use an active cooling solution on a hard drive.

A simple fan will suffice.
 
Well, every 10 degrees celcius of increased heat is 50% decreased life. So, it's hard to say yes or no without knowing what temperature your hard drives are reading. Install speedfan and get back to us with that info
 
Google released a study on hard drive life, taking into account temperature, usage, and SMART information, and if I remember correctly, high temp hard drives didn't have a higher rate of failure (in fact, very very low temp hard drives did). I'm sure that if you google it, you'll find it. There is a PDF somewhere.

EDIT: Found the link http://216.239.37.132/papers/disk_failures.pdf

Turns out that >45C drives did have a higher rate of failure, but only slightly - and <25C drives were terrible.
 
Speed fan reads one as 31c and the other as 34c. last night I saw them both jump to 39c. I think i'll just go ahead and add the fan I had underneath them in the first place. Its better to be safe than sorry.
 
Vertigo Acid said:
Well, every 10 degrees celcius of increased heat is 50% decreased life. So, it's hard to say yes or no without knowing what temperature your hard drives are reading. Install speedfan and get back to us with that info
Click to expand...

You're talking about semiconductors there, not hard drives.

As stated, google released a massive survey a little while back that actually shows the cooler drives, if anything, fail more often.
 
Make sure your added fan doesn't worsen temps by messing up the case airflow. Sometimes adding more fans is counterproductive.
 
mwarps said:
You're talking about semiconductors there, not hard drives.

As stated, google released a massive survey a little while back that actually shows the cooler drives, if anything, fail more often.
Click to expand...

What do you think is on the circuit boards on the bottom of your hard drive?
 
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