is it ok to leave the side panel off?

[JaredzzC]

The temperature for my hard drives seem to be hitting 50 degrees within 10 minutes of playing games so I only ever play for around 30 minutes at a time because im worried i'll damage my HDDs.

Will it be ok to leave my side panel off?
(excluding the one for the liquid cooling) i have 2 120mm fans ... one at the front and side but they don't seem to be doing the job, so i wanted to see if taking the side panel off would make any difference .

Regards,
Jared.

 

[Gam3r01]

It wont make much of a difference unless you have something blowing into it. With it off the intake fans will now push air out of the case, and the rest of the system will be using static air, rather than air being vented.
What case do you have? You can try to add more intakes.

 

[Jacob McIntosh]

It's safe, but make sure that you keep animals and kids away from it. If they touch a component, not only will they get a zap but it will (likely) fry the component, and if they touch a fan they could cut themselves on the blade.

 

[ss202sl]

You need more airflow. Many cases have a spot for a fan right next to(in front of) the HDDs.

 

[JaredzzC]

It wont make much of a difference unless you have something blowing into it. With it off the intake fans will now push air out of the case, and the rest of the system will be using static air, rather than air being vented.
What case do you have? You can try to add more intakes.

I have the apevia x-cruiser 2 which comes with a fan on the front and side, so there's not exactly much room for customisation...

 

[SystemDump]

It will get dirty, but I've done it without too many problems. Always seem to need to reseat something... then again, my system really is close to worthless (m2n4sli with 2.4 ghz cpu), so...

Never dealt with liquid cooling either, but I assume an elevated system (on the desk, as opposed to underneath), with no obstruction should be fine until you get your fan situation rectified!

Hope it helps!

 

[GorfTheFrog]

Hi -

How long have you had this machine and these HDs? Is this temp a new behavior?

You may want to run Diskcheckup by Passmark to chek to see if the disk itself is reporting any internal errors.

http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm

Otherwise, I agree with the comments above - you need more airflow directly across the drives.
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[TechGuyAlabama]

If I understand cooling correctly and the fans are set up correctly, having the case closed actually helps the cooling to be more efficient. Could it be the way your fans are faced? The fans blow in a certain direction, duh, but the front ones should pull the opposite direction that your back ones do so that there is a push pull airflow.

 

[JaredzzC]

Thanks for all your replies! : ) I took the side panel off and it worked a charm! GPU temps were before around 90 (which I thought was weird considering I have the Double Dissipation variant of the R9 290) but now the temps don't go over 65 degrees and as for my HDDs, they now hardly go over 35 degrees when gaming, whereas before they'd reach 50-54 degrees. As some of you have said, touching/static could be an issue, so i'll have to be very careful with that. If I could add more fans, i'd buy as many as I possibly could, but my case just doesn't allow me to add anymore in.