In my current project, Delta, I built the HDD rack a little too compactly. The drives are stacked with little space between them, and likely will overheat. I have a solution that I think will work, but I want to hear your ideas first. Currently the drives are attached to two L shaped pieces of aluminium, like this: What do you think I should do.
http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?p=515292 ^That's what it's for. It's a kind of SFF computer, there's very little room for stuff in there after everything is in there. On the second page there should be pics of the HDD rack.
read up on peltier cooling. i believe it's the colling system with two different metals, when an electric current is passed through, one heats up and the other cools thats all i know (well, think i know) about peltier cooling. PS it uses mucho electricity
Also, peltiers need large HSFs so that the hot side doesn't warm the cold side, and so that they don't over heat.
can you expand it give it more space? I think a fan would pump enough air to cool em as hdd's can take the heat pretty well. indeed I run my 2 hard drives just on top of each other
Could you slide a piece of thin sheet metal on top of each drive so that it will have an extended heatsink? That way you could cool the sheet metal sticking out and since heat travels via diffusion then you would be essentially cooling the entire HD.
This would be difficult, as the drives are tightly stacked together. It would require me to do what Metarinka suggested and space out the drives. This would work, but I would have to remake the HDD rack, though I am considering doing that anyways because my HDDs run too hot for their own good. I have a WD400JB that has two 2.5 pound heatsinks on it and the sinks are hot at the end of the day. I was thinking of combining the two suggested methods with my own. A better spaced rack, with copper or alu plates between the drives, and silicon goo or thermal pads between the drives and the rack. Like this: The blue is paste/pads, the black is alu/copper, and the grey is the drives. (as before) What do you think?
wouldn't most of the heat diffuse up to the top drive? I still think a fan blowing even a moderate amount of air over them would cool it a lot better
well I would say be very careful of having thermal paste near hard drives like that. Especially if there are those little vent holes on them. But if your drawing is to scale, I would say just drop them a little bit and give them some space. My hdds are stacked almost on top of eachother, but are actually quite cool, thanks to a 120 right in front.
Well the drives are right beside the PSU vents, (and I have a duct planned) so they'll get some airflow from that, and heat doesn't actually rise, hot air rises, but heat flows out in every direction.
dont most hard drives send the heat to the walls of the drive? If thats the case, then you should just put some large heatsinks on the sides of the hard drive rack. Also, a low powered fan would do some good blowing a bit of air over them.
I was also worried about paste, so I added the option "thermal pad." Thermal pads are usually used in CD drives, and are about 2mm (or 1/16") thick. They offer superior thermal interface than direct contact, and they don't flow like paste. They are worse than paste for heat transfer though. I could remove the pieces of metal that are between the drives, that would give them air space. Here's what the space concerns are: There's less than a quarter inch on either side of the drive rack, and about 1/2" above the drives.
I would suggest spacing the drives about 1/4" apart if possible, and consider putting vent holes in the case in front of the hd's so air is pulled over them. or add a fan behind them simply to help circulate air inside the case somewhat.
I'd like to put vents infront of the HDDs, but that would mess with the case airflow, the best that I can do is duct the power supply intake over and through the harddrives.
