Fans for the hard drives

[tigersty1e]

Are fans blowing on the hard drives necessary?

I don't OC but my hard drives get hot to the touch.

 

[Rubycon]

How hot?

Either read the temp through SMART or use a non contact thermometer. Generally if the disk operating temperature is kept at 50C or below it will be fine. Active cooling isn't usually required on modern desktop drives unless they are mounted with less than 1/2" air space above/below the drive or in close proximity of another disk.

 

[stevolution]

Well I guess it's always safe to have a fan or passive cooling for your harddrive. In my case, I have 5 harddrives and 2 of them are in RAID 0 so got cooling for them rightaway since I don't wanna risk of loosing all of them due to high temp (and they did get really hot.. just like you said hot to touch).

Check the temperature and if it does get over 50 then you should consider it

 

[bob4432]

personally i run active cooling on all of my hdds. granted i run a couple 15k ones very close together, but even in the rigs that i have that only have 1 or 2hdds, they all have active cooling. does it help? don't know, but it can't hurt. plus i live in a hot enviornment so any help i can give them i do.

if you have the ability to easily put a fan in front of the hdds, i would do it. doesn't cost much.

 

[tigersty1e]

Originally posted by: Rubycon
How hot?

Either read the temp through SMART or use a non contact thermometer. Generally if the disk operating temperature is kept at 50C or below it will be fine. Active cooling isn't usually required on modern desktop drives unless they are mounted with less than 1/2" air space above/below the drive or in close proximity of another disk.

What is SMART?

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: tigersty1e


What is SMART?

Basic SMART info

Many programs can read the SMART parameters in Windows. If the drive is connected to a plain IDE/SATA controller on the motherboard, this is the case.

 

[ForumMaster]

my HDD (single WD 80GB IDE 7200) is usually at around 30C. i do have a fan on it since it came with the case (Cooler Master Centurion 5 FTW!) i live in Israel so it does get kind of hot in the summer so it's great when that time of year approaches. if you have more then one hard drive without space in between them, separate them. if you have a drive faster then 7200RPM, you should probably get active cooling for it.

although Google published a study showing that temps don't really effect drive reliability as much as age does, i still believe that if the drive is kept cool, it will last longer (metal doesn't contract/expand as much.)

 

[gtjr]

i have 2 seagate 7200rpm hdd's and i put 1x 80mm fan to cool them im using my pc 24/7 the temp reads between 39C to 45C

 

[Jiggz]

You can't go wrong with a hdd fan although you might want something with less noise. Cheapo hdd fans are noisy. But they do help in cooling the hdd thus its reliability.