do I really need the front fan?

[telimar]

hi

I bought a new computer recently (in my sig).
the front fan is making too much noise. so I disconnected it.
the fan is right in front of the disks. really close to the HDD. (got an SSD and a HDD).
thinking my disks might be missing the fan and getting to hot: after half a day of work on the computer - I turned off the computer...opened the computer box and touched the HDD.
it was really cool. not hot at all.

so , does that prove I don't need that noisy front fan?

 

[mhenley]

Check the temps for everything else in the case. If the CPU, GPU, NB, and PSU are all within acceptable range, then no, you didn't need the fan. Personally, I would replace it anyway, simply because that case doesn't have much intake to begin with and fans aren't that expensive. If you don't want to drop the money on a fan controller, try finding one that comes with an optional resistor, or a speed switch. On my Antec 1300 I use the Antec Tri-Cool fans and although they are not considered the best by the community, their cooling to noise ratio is nice and I didn't have to buy a fan controller.

 

[MacLeod]

Agreed. If the temps of your other components are fine without the fan, then you have your answer. I have 2 of them running, and 3 exhaust and 1 200mm intake. I want as much airflow in my case as possible and it does make a difference in overclocking temps. If youre not doing any overclocking, then you wont need nearly as much cooling. I say youll be fine.

 

[telimar]

I forgot to mention that that fan was optional at the store and I asked for it because I was adding the HDD in adition to the SSD.

oh and I'm not overclocking

 

[telimar]

I was about to check the temps of all the component....but....err....how do I know the range each componet should be?

 

[Deleted member 184142]

HDD's don't often need active cooling unless in a very hot environment, there was even a white paper put out on this, that Google showed HDD's failed more when over cooled than hotter. With a stock CPU and no GPU etc etc, a single exhaust fan will be more than enough, the system would even be fine without that, many OEM systems don't have anything other than the HS and PSU. I am sure the store picked some cheap high speed fan and slapped it in there, if you want to keep the fans but want something quieter and not to much, look at the AC F12, it's PWM so speed can be controlled by the mobo.

 

[telimar]

but you guys are right, I really should check the temp of all the components to be sure.
so the question now is how do I know the range each components should be?

 

[juicedown]

I'd say yes, for sure. When my desktop didn't have a front fan installed, it ran much hotter for sure.

 

[Deleted member 184142]

Since you do not have a dedicated GPU all you will be looking at is core temp, so go and DL core temp and see what the readings are under load, I think that CPU has close to a 100C TjMax (core temp will show this).

 

[oz8997]

If the front fan keeps the inside a bit cooler I would just go ahead and put in a quieter more efficient fan.

 

[telimar]

but you guys are right, I really should check the temp of all the components to be sure.
so the question now is how do I know the range each components should be?

please , you are not answering this question.....
how do I know which temp is the right one for my components ?

 

[cyclone3d]

HDD's don't often need active cooling unless in a very hot environment, there was even a white paper put out on this, that Google showed HDD's failed more when over cooled than hotter. With a stock CPU and no GPU etc etc, a single exhaust fan will be more than enough, the system would even be fine without that, many OEM systems don't have anything other than the HS and PSU. I am sure the store picked some cheap high speed fan and slapped it in there, if you want to keep the fans but want something quieter and not to much, look at the AC F12, it's PWM so speed can be controlled by the mobo.

Really... I have years and years of experience with having to replace hard drives because there wasn't enough cooling in OEM boxes.

My machines on the other hand, always have "too much cooling" and I haven't had a hard drive that I bought new fail in around 10 years.

Keep the drives from even getting warm to the touch and they will last a very very long time.

 

[cyclone3d]

please , you are not answering this question.....
how do I know which temp is the right one for my components ?

You can look up the specs for your components on the manufacturers web site.

HDDs usually have a temp printed on the sticker.

As for only paying attention to the max temp listed by the mfg... that is not a good idea at all.

Keeping stuff as cool as possible is the best way to make sure the components have a long life.

OEMs pay more attention to the max temps in their boxes, and thus don't cool them near enough. This has changed a bit in the past couple of years, but before that they had massive issues with components failing because of improper cooling.

Their cooling methods really haven't changed that much. From what I can tell it is just because newer components don't put off as much heat.

 

[Deleted member 184142]

please , you are not answering this question.....
how do I know which temp is the right one for my components ?

See my post #9.

Really... I have years and years of experience with having to replace hard drives because there wasn't enough cooling in OEM boxes.

My machines on the other hand, always have "too much cooling" and I haven't had a hard drive that I bought new fail in around 10 years.

Keep the drives from even getting warm to the touch and they will last a very very long time.

Reallllllly now, thats one hell of a lab you got there to be able to tell that those drives failed because of heat reasons, that's really amazing.

"Temperature is often quoted as the most important environmental factor affecting disk drive reliability. Previous studies have indicated that temperature deltas as low as 15C can nearly double disk drive failure rates. Here we take temperature readings from the SMART records every few minutes during the entire 9-month window of observation and try to understand the correlation between temperature levels and failure rates. We have aggregated temperature readings in several different ways, including averages, maxima, fraction of time spent above a given temperature value, number of times a temperature threshold is crossed, and last temperature before failure. Here we report data on averages and note that other aggregation forms have shown similar trends and and therefore suggest the same conclusions. We first look at the correlation between average temperature during the observation period and failure. Figure 4 shows the distribution of drives with average temperature in increments of one degree and the corresponding annualized failure rates. The figure shows that failures do not increase when the average temperature increases. In fact, there is a clear trend showing that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates. Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal of this trend."

Link here.

As I find it very doubtful you had something running on all these computers that had hard drives go bad to log SMART data and temps to even guess at what caused them to fail. So all you are going off of are assumptions of why you think the drive went bad without knowing anything about the environment it came from or how it was treated, while all the other studies that are out there are showing that higher temps do not add to failure rates unless you are dealing with extreme (out of spec) temps.