Cooling for external hard drives

[gaschalk]

I have several terabit external drives that keep failing when the temp in the room hits around 30 deg.cel. What is the best way to keep these drives cool with keeping the cost down.

 

[danevil]

I have several terabit external drives that keep failing when the temp in the room hits around 30 deg.cel. What is the best way to keep these drives cool with keeping the cost down.

crank up the A.C lolz. seriously though im unaware of external hdd coolers your best bet would be keep them low out of direct sun or heat radiating electronics and a 15$ home fan to circulate more air through vents might help.

 

[sminlal]

I've standardized on using the WD Green drives in my external USB enclosures because they run noticeably cooler than my other drives.

 

[photonboy]

1) A good aluminum external case.
2) A case with a fan (noisy).
3) A case like the BlacX which has the hard drive sitting exposed to the air (best but not practical for moving)

FYI, you mean Terabyte, not Terabit (in computers, the smallest unit of measure is a "bit". A Byte is eight bits. In computers, normally we deal with binary measurement so "Mega" is 1024x "Kilo" instead of 1000. Storage is the exception. A Terabyte drive is actually 1000000000 bits. To calculate "real" computer Bytes we divide by 1024. The unformatted storage is 1000000000/1024/1024 Gigabytes. Once a Terabyte drive has been formatted AND calculating based in computer Bytes (base 2) we have 930GB free for storage.)

 

[photonboy]

I'm not sure why you have several 1TB external drives. I assume you only really need one at a time and the rest are for storing videos or something.

Anyway, you could use the BlacX and swap between drives easily. Just be sure to put the unused drive in a proper static bag then put it in a box with bubble wrap or similar shock absorbing material until needed. I've seen the BlacX on sale recently so check out NCIX, Newegg etc to see if there are any sales.

 

[wildwell]

I mount my aluminum external enclosures horizontally in a rack and have a fan from the drugstore blow over them.

I'm not sure why you have several 1TB external drives. I assume you only really
need one at a time and the rest are for storing videos or something.

Yeah, many of today's HD video codecs easily produce files over 1GB/minute.

 

[photonboy]

In the future I'm sure you'll wish to go with a single box like the Western Digital Sharespace:
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=584

I'm waiting for prices to come down on the 2TB drives and especially the networked storage boxes. I'm willing to pay up to $300 for a networked storage device and $125 per 2TB drive for about $800 total.

I want something that I can access remotely, but mainly it's for sharing DVD/BluRay rips (mine of course) and other video through the network. I keep looking around for an easy and cheap way to build one using something like the ATOM.

Consdering the fact that I also want a device for each HDTV to actually play the content maybe I should construct a Home Theater PC that also serves as my Home Server. In this case, maybe a dual-core ION solution (the REVO with 330 ION looked interesting spec wise).

I did the math and my DVD collection (and the, uh, rest of the video) is over 6GB. At about 20 minutes per disc the prospect of putting all these DVD's on my hard drives is another issue...