Fan and hard drive placement

[bigdaddyshamrock80]

I recently built my first pc, and I'm wondering if I can move the hard drives somewhere as they are blocking my front lower fan, or is it fine?

Also, my display port drive is not working all of a sudden. Any info on that? Brand new gpu.

Asus vg248qe monitor
Corsair spec 2
Ryzen 1600x
Corsair h60 aio cooler
Gigabyte ab350 gaming 3 motherboard
2x8gb ddr4 3000mhz ram
Evga gtx 1060 6gb
Evga 600w power supply
120gb ssd
2tb Seagate hard drive
1tb seagate gard drive
5 120mm fans

https://imageshack.com/i/plgBNPjOj

 

[Solandri]

HDDs need some cooling. Not much, but they need some. I once hooked up a pair of 1.5 TB HDDs outside the case to copy data off them, and went to have dinner. When I got back, both copies had failed when both drives shut down due to excessive temperature. When I got into their SMART stats, one had hit 56 C, the other had passed 60 C. I set them up again with a small, slow fan blowing air between them, which was enough to keep their temps down around 40 C. (This is also why you shouldn't run a PC with the case open for extended periods of time - air intake then comes from the open side, instead of through the HDDs.)

That's why HDDs are usually placed in front of air intakes - the passive airflow is sufficient to cool them. If they're blocking an intake fan, you can move them, but just be sure the new location gives them some airflow. i.e. Don't shove them in a corner or against the side where there's no airflow. If you're unsure, you can always monitor their temps in their new location to decide if they're getting enough airflow. They will heat up more when reading or writing large amounts of data. So monitoring their temps while copying a couple hundred GB of data is a good test.