But until I do, and unless they say otherwise, I am going to stick with top/bottom cooling, not side cooling.
I don't buy the 'side as heatsink to the case' argument, as I've NEVER seen any mention of this by drive makers, even when they talk about the need to ensure adequate cooling air flow. (over the top and bottom of the drive BTW) I know that if I were a drive engineer, I certainly wouldn't want to bet on the case as a heat sink, since I would have NO control over what kind of case or cooling that would provide - Some cases are plastic. Some cases use rails rather than solid mounts (including some plastic rails!). Some users rubber mount their drives in an effort to reduce noise (anybody we know???
) Even in the best case of a solid mount to a steel drive cage, it's still pretty wimpy as a heat sink. Given an environment over which I would have so little control, I would plan on some other cooling path and take anything that comes from the sides as a bonus.
For myself, given current discussion, I'm inclining towards the notion of multiple top / bottom plate coolers in a 'sandwich' configuration, to cool things down with a foam wrap around the entire HD bundle for noise suppression. I will be using the new 10 and 15K rpm U160 SCSI Seagate Cheetahs, and everything I've read about them says they are noisy and hot, but that the speed is worth it
As a side note, I did a bit of work on my old dinosaur PC last night, I added a second 4GB HD (doubled my drive space) and did a bit of silencing. I removed the sheet metal grill from the PSU fan, which helped a little bit. The big change was to cut an old mouse pad (one of the cloth covered rubber ones) into strips and jam a strip inbetween each side of the hard drives and the (slightly bent) drive cage. I also had to replace the drive screws with ones that were slightly longer. I was going to screw through the mouse pad strips, but found that didn't really work because of the difficulty of getting the holes to line up, I was afraid that I'd bang the drives up to much if I kept trying so I just let it go by getting enough of the strip in place that I had no metal - metal contact other than the screws. The result is far from silent, but even with two hard drives instead of one, it's still quieter than it was.
Gooserider
PS, Bladerunner, did you get the PM I sent you the other day about the problem I was having with your website? If you didn't let me know and I can try to do a resend.