If the link highlights anything its more that the whole drive is a pretty similar temp all over, backing up the belief its mainly general heatsoak over time, rather than high point heat. it's hard to be definite because all drives will differ by there design and components used.

Not wishing to shun that persons results at all, but it was measured with the drive on its edge. How long was it like that for? because we all know heat rises.

With those infra red sensors to get a close comparison, all surfaces should be the similar colour too.

It's easy to say in theory cooling the cover wont do much but it seems to in practise, true it may not be as good as cooling the motor or sides, but to infer it doesn't work well is incorrect in my experience. It really depends on how efficiently you need to cool them, balanced with other important factors like space block design & layout.

For the test I placed the disk on the edgeoutside the case, away of air currents. Then run different HDD intensive apps for about two hours. At that time dtemp had stabilized, reporting 42º-43º, then I measured.

Color don't make a noticeable difference, the black parts showed the same when covered with masking tape. Only metal surfaces read bad, so i covered the motor's center with tape, and read the cover on the white sticker.

Meassured temps were the following:

Motor = 40.2º
Base = 39.2º
Side =38.8º
Cover =36.4º

So the total delta between the coldest and hottest spot on the drive, excluding chips, was 3.8ºC. Not a big thing to me, considering that the goal is to keep it reasonably cool. I'm not going to overclock my hdd, just want to lower the airflow need.

I'm prety sure that all you need to watercool a drive is just a spit on any surface, but now i know that my spit is going to be 3-4ºC more efficient on the underside. :D

I should agree with you for 100%, as it is the same way I cool my HDD's but.....
It's not only from cooling the hottest spot, contact area should matter also! And the contact area fron the sides is larger.

So I'm a bit confused here :rolleyes: It seems to be that the HDD transfers the heat generated at the hot spot (motor) fairly well (good design).
So should I focus on the hotspot with a smaller area or the sides with a bigger area to get the best cooling :shrug:
Or both? :D

That would be the difference that validates top cooling.

BTW, I read somewhere that a temp decrease of 10 deg will double the life of an electronic component, and I happen to know that 45 deg C is on the hot side of comfort for an IC, so I'd cool that 60 deg C chip if I was you!

;)

Fhorst: do what you think is best. It's a balance between efficiency, and the amount of work you're willing to put into it.

Most ICs are fine as long as they're below 100C. 45C is certainly not "on the hot side". :p

How do you figure? On a standard 1/2 height, 3.5" HDD, I get about 6" X .75", or approx 9"^2 for both sides. The top is about 6" X 4" or 24"^2, looks to me like the top has about 2.5 X the surface area of the sides. On top of that, the useful side surface area is reduced by the fact that the sides on many drives are milled to recess the casting everywhere but at the mounting screw holes.

I'm holding a Seagate Cheetah 10KRPM drive (ST39102LW) in my lap as I type this to get my measurments. I would estimate the actual contact area for a flat plate bolted to the sides is actually in 3 strips about 1/4" X 3/4" on each side plus a thin ridge ~1/16" along the base casting / top seam. Certainly less than 2"^2 total. IMNSHO, this is NOT consistent with an intent by the manufacturer to dissipate much heat from the sides, indeed it looks to me like they are trying to MINIMIZE the contact area!

The bottom (PCB side) is even worse, there are 6 little islands (4 threaded mounting holes, two smaller balance pads) coming off the base casting, each about the size of a 6/32 screw head. The drive motor is well below the plane of the contact pads. So is the rest of the circuit board, and all the electronic components. However, it does appear that the PCB is either touching or is in VERY close proximity to the base casting, I could not see a gap between them. It looks like the PCB is intended to be cooled by conduction into the base casting.

OTOH, the top has an irregularly shaped high area, most of which is covered by the drive label, however I would estimate that the useable cooling surface is about 75-80% of the drive top.

I would add that according to at least some of the material I've read (including a big article on hard drive mechanics on the big hard drive review site) the PRIMARY source of heat in an HDD is air friction and turbulence from the disks churning the air inside the drive. This air turbulence also means that heat will be transferred very efficiently from any hot spots to wherever the cooling solution is being applied.

Gooserider

IMPORTANT NOTE:

I just learned a valuable lesson! IF you screw a block across the HDD motor on each side... like this...

http://pages.sbcglobal.net/mmz_tl_01...s/Dscn0472.jpg

MAKE SURE the block does not press the motor (i.e. - make sure you have about 2 thousandths clearance on the motor with the block tightned down.

Mine was pressing on the motor and eventually caused the drive to have physical errors... I'm still trying to get an accurate Ghost image off of the RAID pair. :cry: :mad: :eek:

This apparently warped the casing of the drive, throwing the platters out of alignment with the heads... USE CAUTION WHEN PUTTING ON THIS KIND OF SOLUTION!!!

I may change over to a drive cage made with copper and water channels. :confused: :shrug:

Definitely worth warning about but you can't possibly be sure your block killed it? We take HDD's for granted now but they are still intricate complex items and occasionally they can just die for no obvious reasons....... :shrug:

In trying to get a ghost image have you tried the drive in all positions? If you don't get any joy and your data is important take it to a data recovery place they might be able to help... :(

Also note IDE hard drives have much higher failure rates and are much less tolerant of vibration and heat than SCSI. It's possible a block bolted across the disk like that altered the vibration characteristics enough to throw the heads off. Additionally a lot of IDE disks only have a bearing at one end of the spindle making it relatively easy to put the spindle out of alignment.
Lots of nice data about disk design here.

Back on HDD cooling, I'm thinking about setting up watercooling for 3 HDDs. I was thinking about a pair of side blocks with the HDDs bolted in and then the bolts mounted on a frame with rubber grommets for vibration isolation. However reading that article has me concerned that the drives would vibrate each other a lot and cause poor performance or errors. Any idea how much more noise I'll get from just securely bolting the blocks to the frame (thus giving the whole assembly a lot more rigidity to reduce vibrations)?

I find that its mostly seek noise that dramatically increases if you hard mount the drive to the case. Motors are virtually silent on cuda IV (sp) but this increased a little with rigid mounting. Different drives and different cases will of course give different results.

I'm not sure that the vibration issue is anything to be worried about, mine have been "non mounted" with bottom drive sitting on some open cell soft foam, motor side down block just sitting loose on top. The other drive flipped over with motor side upwards on top of the w/b. No case connection at all except for thin grounding wires, data and power... two years now no obvious issues, although one seems perhaps a little "nosier" in heavy seek..

Well, true, but that'll depend on the type of IC. With MOSFETs, temps can reach in excess of 100 deg C and still be nominal.

Either way, the point was that a 10 deg C drop will double the life component, and that still stands. ;)

Butcher, you'll find lots of info on silently mounting and cooling HDD's over on Silent PC Review (spcr.com) - they have a forum just on the topic of silencing hard drives.

Gooserider

I can say for sure it was the block that caused the data errors :mad: ... the drive is actually working fine... it just had errors that had to be corrected. Once the block was removed I didn't hear the heads "realigning" themselves (read: "banging" :cry: ).

I suspect had my tolerences of the block mounting been better with just one or two thousandths clearance on the spindle motor it would not have occured. :rolleyes:

I believe that the clamping force of that 1/2" copper block could EASILY warp the aluminum casing. I will be revisiting the whole setup anyway as I'm now ZeroFilling the drive to recover the low level format.

I will probably go with stacked drives and a cage made from copper with water passages on each side and a loop in the front to connect them. :shrug:

This will also save space in the case as I have a lot of tubing and a large reservior. Not to mention that I got an additional two drives to make the RAID 0 into a RAID 0 + 1. :D

Nothing like a near miss to make you appreciate increased reliability, huh? :D
On paper, 0+1 only has the reliability of a standalone drive, but I like the fact that it gives you a chance to quickly swap out a drive when one of them fails...
...I'm not so fond of the performance hit it gives when working with ATA disks. But it's still a nice compromise. :)

Bump :) How's the construction going ben?

On hold, pending more copper.

So much work to do, so little time...

I'll post pics of the progress, as it comes.

Glad to hear you're still going. Copper is expensive.

I just got mine, but I'm taking a different approach than you. I got some 3/16" plate for the top and bottom, and 3' of 1/2" wide x 1/4" thick bar for the sides. I figure I can cut it to length and make the middle "box" out of it. Then have a piece of the bar running down the center so the water has to move in U to get around the block. I'll post details when I get to it. It'll be fun tryign to solder all that crap together I suspect.

Im going to be making a hdd block soon, after ive finnished some others. Im thinking about how to do it. id like to combine this type of mounting http://www.spodesabode.com/content/a...hddnoise/print
with a way of silently cooling the drive enough, so that when its wrapped in foam, it wont overheat.
On my drives, currently mounted in a steel drive cage, the sides are not very hot, about 45c, but a few chips are about 65c

An update, since this thread is creeping back up...

I got the copper.

end of update. :D

The plan still stands though. The only regret I have so far is picking out the external walls of each block at 1/4" thick: they can be a lot thinner.

Lol, i see how you got your custom tag now :p

Im considering watercooling my hds so i can put them into an enclosure and finally get rid of that annoying whine. My only question is how should i put the hd's into my water cooling loop. I currently only have a CPU block, so should I just put it in series with that, or would a parallel config be better?

In series, definitely.

The pressure drop of an HDD block *should* be minimal, and wouldn't have a significant impact on coolant temp.

Otherwise, the heatload from an HDD is quite minimal (at least the heat transfered to the block) and so it's really not going to matter a whole lot how it's set up, but putting it in parallel, would cause a significant drop in flow for the rest of the system, so "in series" is always advisable.