I'm going to be stashing my sunbeam UV cold cathode inverters under the HDD caddy in my Lian Li PC-65. But I read somewhere from someone that their harddrive was corrupted or damaged from keeping an inverter too close to the drive. Has anyone heard this before?
it sounds possible due the the hard drive being sensitive to magnets and the fact the inverter will probably give out very small amounts of magnetic interference, probably too small to be of any concern but you can never be too carefull
Because this is only a one time incident I'm not that sure that corruption was caused by the inverter itself. Sure, it puts out a magnetic field of some strength and heat but don't think that they are enogh to damage the drive. More likely possibility would be that they split the power for the inverter from the same molex that was going to the HDD and the weak power supply didn't manage to keep the power leves high enough and that damaged the FAT when the drive was operational.
I've got 2 dual inverters (ones with 2 outputs) sitting ontop of my main hdd (couldn't find anywhere out of view to stick them) the've been there for about 5-6 months now and I haven't had any problems
In my opinion, it's more likely that if data corruption did occur due to the inverter, the cause is more likely to be due to the fact that the inverter is causing interference to the IDE interface. So making sure the inverter isn't next to the IDE cable should be the primary concern.
Solve the problem... If you're worried, wrap the inverter in Alu tape (the shiny stuff that just has a sticky back, foil stuff) so it's in a faraday cage so to speak.. This will shield both magnetic and electrostatic radiation inside the inverter... Why they put those things in plastic boxes I'll never know... the cheapo ones will make your soundcard whine like a teenage girl at the mall.
