I was looking for information as to why there are hard drive cooling solutions. I don't believe there's anything that calls for extra cooling for the drive itself. I am guessing that it exists to lower the ambient air temperature inside the case, but I'm just not sure. In short, I'm curious for myself if hard drive cooling is worth the money and time.
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Hard Drive Cooling
- Thread starter NExUS1g
- Start date
Its absolutely worth it. If your HDD fails you're big time screwed. In your case basically you want everything running as cool as possible with the exception of maybe optical drives I have active cooling for everything in my case. The hard drive is too important not to invest a few bucks in towards its cooling.
Heck at minimum point an extra 80mm fan in its directions. Depending on your case you should have some option for direct active cooling. If not get a hard drive cooler. Its not a guarantee against mechanical failure but nothing is all you're trying to do is make things as good as you can
Heck at minimum point an extra 80mm fan in its directions. Depending on your case you should have some option for direct active cooling. If not get a hard drive cooler. Its not a guarantee against mechanical failure but nothing is all you're trying to do is make things as good as you can
I'm not exactly going to be overclocking my HDD. Even if it does fail, I buy a new one and reinstall. Never known a hard drive to fail due to overheating. Head crashing, yeah, but overheating, nah.
So other than what you stated, there's really no other reason?
Google's data from their massive farms of hard drives say failures actually happen more in cooler temperatures...
http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf (see graphs on page 6)
http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf (see graphs on page 6)
That's interesting. But in thinking why that would be the case I can see that it's mechanical and it does make sense that it would be more likely to fail when cool. Like a car engine; it has an optimal operating temperature and running it cool is worse than running it hot (of course not too hot
).One other thing to consider with hard drives is the range of temperature the hard drive encounters over its lifetime. The metals in the hard drive case have to expand and contract slightly as they get warmer and cooler. In theory, if you can keep a less extreme range of temperature, this will probably extend the lifetime of the hard drive.
If you already have good airflow in your case, probably no big deal either way, but if the hard drive consistently goes from room temp to over 120 F /48.8 C, I would use active cooling for the hard drive.
For this reason, I have used active cooling for my hard drives for many years, without any problems.
If you already have good airflow in your case, probably no big deal either way, but if the hard drive consistently goes from room temp to over 120 F /48.8 C, I would use active cooling for the hard drive.
For this reason, I have used active cooling for my hard drives for many years, without any problems.
That's interesting. But in thinking why that would be the case I can see that it's mechanical and it does make sense that it would be more likely to fail when cool. Like a car engine; it has an optimal operating temperature and running it cool is worse than running it hot (of course not too hot
Actually nit picking here, but running an internal combustion below operating temperature would be much much safer (oil pressure and adherence play in here) than running it above operating temperature. However, there are extremes to both sides and either extreme will surely result in catastrophic damage.
Back on topic; I've never had a hard drive fail besides an 80Gb WD that had a problem with the power connector resulting in intermitent operation and this took nearly seven years to show it's effect and result in absolute failure.
While I will say that I find it unreasonable to invest in a drive cooling device, if it also offers lower operating noise levels, it's definately worth it IMO.
...come to think of it, I've always had some sort of 'active' cooling for my drives. Usually placed directly in front of the case's intake fan...
