Cooling How hot is to hot? (For hard drives)

I have recently been working on a custom case and after running the system for a while these are the temps that my drives run constantly :

WD Raptor 36gb - 41-45C
WD 120gb - 35-41C
WD 200gb - 35-40C

Now i know that some heat is ok, but would these be running to hot for day to day use? and if so please take a look at my project log and help with some ideas of how i could cool them better.

 

From the Western Digital site:

Operating Temperature and Humidity
Temperature 5°C to 55°C
Humidity 5-95% RH non-condensing
Thermal Gradient 20°C/hour (maximum)
Humidity Gradient 20%/hour (maximum)

That's the specs for your raptor, so as you can see, your temps are just about on the high end of acceptable (it just takes one hotter than normal day...).
Looking at your hard-drive arangement, just fitting a fan (80mm or bigger) under your rads and in front of the HD's should provide enough airflow, although you might have to drill a few holes to let the air in, in the first place.

 

was looking at possibly doing that, only problem is with the control panel i have, not much space behind it to do so

and thank you for the specs, didn't even think to look those up

 

Average Drive temp is between 30 and 55 degrees C depending on the airflow in your rig. Your drives are well within specifications (my Samsung Spinpoints are the quietest and coolest running drives out there and they average 40 degrees C). You've no cause to worry whatsoever and cooling them will just increase the noise coming from your case

 

The funny thing is that my temps with that system, in the case i made, are AWSOME. Idle for the p4 3.0 at stock speed was 28c and at 100% load it never went above 35C. with the cpu at 3.51ghz, I am looking right now at a 35C idle and it never goes above 38C at 100%. (Reason for the high idle temps oc'd atm are because i have a Compaq Proliant 5000 server and a Storage Array case with 7x4.3gb Scsi drives and they are heating up my room. *Also they are VERY loud *)

The 100% load was tested by running two prime95's (because of HT) for about an hour at each clock speed.

 

I wouldn't let mine get over 50, although I'm happier with them at the 30ish mark they're at, a cool HDD is a long lived HDD.

Are most of your hard drives one on top of the other? if you have a drive sandwiched next to another, the temps will double, sometimes more. you want a space above and below each one.

 

there is about 3/8ths inch between them . i think what i will try to do is reorient the drives so that the sit vertical in the case .. not sure yet though .. thanks for the help

 

That's fine for hard drives. Start to worry when they hit 50'c +.

 

You could rotate them onto their side without changing the space they take up too much, then maybe there's enough room to mount a small fan to one side of your control pannel.
(ps, I'm using a 92mm Panaflo to keep my raptor and two other drives at a comfortable 27c max cool harddrives are happy harddrives)

 

Those temperatures are fine - if you're worried, minimal airflow is needed to cool them. I have a 7-volted quiet fan over my drives (both Seagate 7200.7s) and they idle at ~33, load at 40 when heavily gaming. Not bad considering how cramped the HD rack is (stupid long 7800 :\)