Recommendation wanted, HDD cooler

[LiamC]

I am a bit concerned with temps of my Atlas II 15K and wanted to install a HDD cooler. Can anybody recommend one? Low noise, lots of airflow...

 

[Sol]

Coolermaster make a cage that allows you to fit 4x 3 1/2" drives into 3x 5 1/4" bays which has a 120mm fan for cooling. That at least doesn't seem like a complete waste of drive bays if you have a few extra hard drives (and should provide pretty good cooling with not a huge amount of noise.)

I'll be installing one tonight in my file server so I should be able to give a better review tomorrow.

Other than that most of the coolers I've seen are passive or have 40mm fans at best and I'm not a great fan of 40mm fans, they tend to either make a lot of noise or not actually accomplish much. Vantec make a couple of coolers with larger fans which I would guess would be a little more effective, but you'd probably want to check some reviews...

 

[ddrueding]

I agree with Sol on this one. Fans small enough to fit in a single-drive enclosure will not work well, will be noisy and will fail quickly. One option is to get a multi-drive enclosure that is larger (and consequently has a larger fan). The other option is more of a home-brew; Use a Zalman heatpipe cooler to increase the surface area (I've had really good results with these), and then mount a larger (>80mm) fan somewhere in the vicinity to get some airflow past the drive.

 

[LiamC]

I miss using my Lian Li case. The drive enclosure of choice was aluminium, and had 2 x 80 or a 120mm fan drawing air through a filter to blow straight across the drives.

Home brew it is I guess.

 

[Santilli]

http://www.casecooler.com/casecooler/ulhardrivcoo.html

http://www.newegg.com/product/Produ...Ultimate+Hard+Drive+cooler+with+2+sleeve+fans

These used to be 50 dollars.

I've used them in the past, with no problems. If I find one digging around, would you be intrested in trying it?

Liam, are you in OZ?

s

 

[LiamC]

They look interesting. I'll dig around.

Yep, an Aussie.

 

[Santilli]

Try checking how much it would be to ship a pound to San Francisco.

That should give us a ball park figure if it's worth my even digging around to find it.

Thanks

Greg