Do-it-yourself backlit fan from a hard drive. Combining cooling and quietness of a hard drive using the example of two devices: Titan TTC-HD90 and Scythe Quite Drive How to make a fan from a hard drive

Those who work at the computer at night or just stay up late know well that the computer can seem very noisy in those moments when the hustle and bustle around subsides, and the background noise of everyday life almost disappears. First of all, the fans are noisy, they can be replaced with quieter ones, coolers for processors and video cards are also not a problem - even passive radiators are easy to buy nowadays. And it is at the very moment when we silence all the fans in the computer that the presence of the hard drive becomes very noticeable. Grinding, growling and sobbing "hard" accompany each copying, loading or other access of the computer to the hard disk. Perhaps for some it sounds ridiculous, but recall that it becomes clearly audible only when the other sources of noise are defeated. In the depths of the hard disk, a spindle with magnetic pancakes rotates at a tremendous speed, and the reading head runs intensively along all their radii, reading and writing information. During operation, the hard drive creates quite significant vibrations that are transmitted to the case of the system unit, if the hard drive is classically fixed in a 3.5 "connector. Some" advanced "cases have rubber gaskets in the places of contact between the case and the hard drive, which greatly reduces the vibration transmitted to the case (for example, ASUS Ascot series cases.) But the hard drive itself continues to be a source of noise, although the overall noise level becomes noticeably lower. separately, and then study the pair complex systems to solve these problems.

Methods to Deal with Hard Drive Noise

If your case is not equipped with rubber inserts, then you can use a special rubber mount for a hard drive in a 5.25 "connector. One of these adapters was discovered in Russian retail under the name" Scythe Hard Disk Stabilizer 2. "There are still many similar devices, but it is very difficult to find them on sale, but this one successfully came to hand. The principle of operation is simple: four rubber posts expand the hard drive mount from 3.5 "format to 5.25". As a result, the hard drive hangs in the 5.25 "case connector on rubber suspension.

As practice has shown, the noise level after such a modification becomes noticeably lower. It is not surprising, because this approach allows the best way dampen vibrations transmitted to the housing. The second way to make your hard drive quieter is to use noise-canceling boxes under the 5.25 "drive bay.

The hard drive hides inside this box, which is designed to absorb vibration and noise from the hard drive. This method has the greatest efficiency in suppressing noise, but exacerbates another issue - cooling the hard drive. To solve this problem, additional blowing fans are sometimes used. But this is a separate topic.

Cooling

The hard drive also heats up, because inside it, mechanical and electronic components work almost continuously, generating heat. Hard disk manufacturers admit that the reliability of their devices when the operating temperature rises from 45 to 55 degrees decreases 2 (!) Times. Under normal conditions, heat is dissipated from the surface of the hard drive enclosure and is transferred to the enclosure walls at the contact points. Modern enclosures are often equipped with "blow-in" fans located on the front of the enclosure. In addition to general ventilation, they also ventilate hard drives. This method is considered the most efficient in terms of cooling, especially if the system has several hard drives that tightly clog the seats in the case. In cases not equipped with such fans, additional cooling of the hard drive can be provided by various HDD coolers. Most of them are divided into three types:

Suspended fans

Suspended fans attach to the bottom of the hard drive and blow the chassis along with the electronics. They usually consist of one or two fans that rotate at 3000 ~ 6000rpm. Such devices most often do not even initially have a low noise level, and over time, when the fan bearings begin to deteriorate, the noise from the fans becomes simply unbearable. Nevertheless, the cooling efficiency is at a fairly high level, active airflow of the case does its job.

Sleds for 5.25 "connector with fans for purging

The name eloquently describes the device of such a cooler: the hard drive is installed into a 5.25 "slot using a slide, and a panel with fans is attached to the place of the plug on the front of the case, which draws in air from the outside of the case and blows it around the hard drive. the air for blowing is taken from outside the system unit, it will always be cooler than the air inside. Disadvantages are also obvious from the description of the design: fans, the number of which is usually two or three, have a standard size of 30 ~ 40 mm, since they are limited by the width of the panel. "even higher than in the previous case, about 5000 ~ 7000 rpm. Initially, the noise from them does not put much pressure on the ears, but the durability of the bearings at this rotational speed is much lower, and they fail faster, with corresponding consequences.

Heatsinks for HDDs installed in 5.25 "slot

This is already a more advanced device, a radiator is attached to the hard disk, which increases the heat dissipation surface, thereby improving cooling. Sometimes these radiators are also blown by fans for greater efficiency. In fact, the efficiency of such a radiator most of all depends on the organization of heat exchange between the hard disk and the radiator. The lower the heat resistance in the places where the hard drive contacts the radiators, the higher the efficiency of the cooling system. But this is very difficult. The hard disk does not have special contact surfaces for heat sinks; more or less efficiently it is possible to remove heat only from the side walls, which have a flat surface and are equipped with mounting holes for installation. Cooling of the electronic equipment of the hard disk is possible only with the help of heat-conducting pads, which have the least efficiency of all heat dissipation methods. The efficiency of this type of HDD cooler is determined by the efficiency of heat removal from the hard disk and the efficiency of its dissipation from the surface of the radiator. Today we are going to look at two 5.25 "HDD heatsinks, which are designed to reduce the noise level from the hard drive while ensuring proper cooling.

Introduction After the publication of the previous article, I received a lot of responses in the mail. :)
Basically, they contained descriptions personal experience communication with IBM hard drives and almost all of them contained the question "why did my hard drive die?" Unfortunately, I cannot answer such questions. :(
Of course, it is not in my power to make sure that such questions are not asked to me at all, but I will try to make sure that as few users as possible face such problems.
In the previous article, I took the liberty of giving a few tips, the implementation of which should reduce the likelihood of failure of the hard drive and thus extend its operating time. One of these tips was the suggestion to cool the hard drive ...

Why is it needed

Why do you need to cool the hard drive at all? In order to understand this, let's see what the hard drive consists of. First of all, you can "divide" the hard drive into two parts - electronics and a jar with disks and heads. The electronic circuit contains several specialized microcircuits: the DSP itself, the motor control processor, the power section and the cache memory microcircuit. For any of these elements, overheating is extremely dangerous - the DSP of the hard drive can generate "wrong" commands, changes in the physical parameters of the engine control system can lead to the fact that the engine will be "whipped up" too often ... I think it's clear to everyone ...
Overheating is also dangerous for the mechanical part of the hard drive. First, due to the thermal expansion of the metal, the load on the bearings increases. Secondly, due to heating, the profile of the plate changes and the tracks turn out to be completely in the wrong place where the heads are looking for them ... Winchester is forced to do thermal calibration ...
Frequent significant changes in the surface temperature of the plate may well cause the magnetic layer to fall off, which can lead to the appearance of bad sectors. It is possible that glass (and the latest-generation IBM hard drive plates are made of glass ...) is very sensitive to such local temperature gradients ...
There is a fundamental article (on the reliability of hard drives and factors affecting it), published on the iXBT website, which should be read by everyone who is even a little interested in how the mean time between failures is calculated for hard drives. So there is a very interesting plate showing how the probability of hard drive failures increases with increasing temperature, some of which I will give in the form of a graph:

Those. at a hard drive temperature of 40 degrees, the probability of failure doubled! But we don't want to shorten the life of the hard drive with our own hands, do we? Hence the moral - the hard drive needs to be cooled!

How it's done

I know two ways to cool hard drives (not fantastic, but simple and affordable) - either you need to "press" a massive heatsink to the surface of the hard drive to remove heat, or blow the hard drive with a stream of air (it is desirable that the air temperature is lower than the temperature of the hard drive).
As for the first recipe, it is very rarely implemented in practice. Common computer cases are very thin and their hard drive baskets are incapable of removing a large number of heat.
The second option can be found much more often - all kinds of fans under the basket, in the basket, etc., that is, the main goal of case designers and cooling devices is to force air to move inside the case. The fans draw in cold outside air, it passes next to the heat-generating blocks of the computer, heats up and is thrown out.

What do they offer us

In this review, we will look at four devices for cooling hard drives.
I represent the test participants:

HD3

The device is a 5 "bay cover on the front panel of the computer with three fans and a set of" 3.5 "-> 5" pants.

The fans are powered from a standard 5-12V connector, there is no fan speed sensor.
Device

HD2

differs from the above only in a smaller number of fans.
But the next device is strikingly different from the previous ones:

SHDC

This kind of "pad" is screwed to the hard drive from the side of the electronics board and cools the lower part of the hard drive and, naturally, the electronics board itself. The fan is powered from a standard connector, there is no monitoring of the rotation speed either.
And finally, the last participant in our tests - UHDC(Ultimate Hard Drive Cooler):

This kit consists of a front panel cover with two fans, a massive radiator and traditional "pants" 3.5 "-> 5". I note right away that, unlike the HD2 & HD3, the UHDC plug has a removable air filter panel. In my opinion - a very nice little thing!
And this is how this kit looks from the back side:

The fans are powered via a standard power connector; monitoring of the fan speed is not supported.

Test system & methodology

Since our task was to create unbearable conditions for the hard drives, we also selected the components for the stand "hotter". Judge for yourself:

Abit KT7A
AMD Athlon 1200MHz
GeForce 2 Pro
Creative sb live
IBM DPTA 372050
ViewStation 701

Those. we took the filling of a good gaming machine and used a case that was not the best in terms of ventilation. Plus, summer has come to Moscow, as I predicted (the temperature in the room was 27 degrees) ...

So, the technique - Windows was loaded on the computer and it was left alone for an hour (disabling disks was prohibited in the Windows properties). An hour later, the temperature value was taken from an external sensor attached to the middle of the top cover of the hard drive.
After that, the IOMeter test was run on the computer with the "random read" pattern. Since the calculation of the block address in this pattern is completely random, the head block actuator was moving intensively. That is, we can assume that this is the maximum possible load on the hard drive.
After an hour of such work, the temperature value was taken, after which the computer was allowed time to cool down.
The tests were repeated three times and the results were averaged.

Test results

I must admit that I did not think that the hot Moscow air would be able to cool the three-plate DPTA, but the results pleasantly surprised me:

The coolers HD3 and HD2 showed the best results - the temperature of the hard drive was only 30 degrees when using them. Moreover, it was the same for the rest mode and intensive work!
The UHDC cooler managed to cool the hard drive up to 30 degrees in burn-mode and up to 29 degrees in rest mode, which is the best result among the tested coolers. Most likely, a massive radiator played a role here ...
The SHDC cooler coped with its work "on the C grade", but it's still better with it than without it ...

conclusions

In total, three coolers out of four managed to "cool" the hard drive by 9 degrees in the burn mode and, theoretically, "extended the life" of the hard drive by one and a half times. If we take a look at the price list, we will see that the price of these devices is incomparable in the benefits that they can bring.
In conclusion, I will express my subjective opinion about the advantages and disadvantages of these coolers.

SHDC
Pros:

cheap
can be used in a 3.5 "basket

Minuses:

average cooling capacity

UHDC
Pros:

removable air filter

Minuses:

bulky
free 5 "bay required
difficult to assemble
there is no way to control the rotation speed

HD2 & HD3
Pros:

excellent cooling capacity
low price

Minuses:

free 5 "bay required
there is no way to control the rotation speed

As for measuring the rotational speed, in my opinion, the manufacturer could complete these devices with a cable with a connector for installation on a motherboard + an adapter for those who do not have free power connectors on the motherboard (or do not have them at all). This, of course, would increase the price of the device, but would add to its attractiveness. Or maybe there are such devices in this world, but I don't know about them ...

P.S. From the first comments from readers (edited a bit by me ...):

One very important point, until no one rushed to buy a cooler in a 5 "compartment - it is very difficult (and sometimes impossible) to insert them into branded cases, in which devices are placed on sleds - InWin, SuperMicro due to the peculiarities of fastening - they are screwed to the case with eight screws - a plug separately , hard drive through adapters separately.
I used to have a cooler with three coolers on the cap, took the InWin508 case and ... I had to abandon the cooler, although there may be those who want to make a miracle sled by themselves;) but most people should bear this in mind.

I confess I missed that. Everything is exactly as DenKiller said. Unfortunately...

Background

What the craving for modding and lack of funds can lead to. Often, fantasy is limited by material possibilities, so I had to work with what I have. The only useless device I had in stock turned out to be an old Quantum hard drive (I don't remember the model) with a capacity of 200MB.

During the day, the project was thought out, and I made a decision: I need to cut! First of all, I thought about the functionality of my model. As a beginner modder, I realized that in the future, effective cooling is indispensable. Therefore, the idea of ​​an HDD cooler came to mind. And I also wanted to dispel the doubts of numerous advisers like "impossible!" or "take care of your fingers!"

Required tools: drill, metal drills (2 - 5 mm), files (round, semicircular and rectangular), soldering iron, GOI paste and felt circle for the drill.

Operations required to implement the mod

1. The cover is removed. The washer fixing the pancake (disk) is unscrewed. All mechanisms are unscrewed from the inside (reading head, microcircuit, magnets.

2. A drawing (pattern) of the future impeller (in any graphic editor, but it's better to use COREL DRAW). Then it is applied to the pancake and glued. In my case, I made an impeller with 6 blades (in order for the cooler not to make noise, it is better to do it with an odd amount blades - 7, 9, 11 ...).

After that, it is fixed in a vice and the workpiece of the future fan is cut out with a hacksaw (if there is a dremel, there is no need to suffer here). It turns out a pancake consisting of 6 parts. The blades are sharpened, if necessary.

3. The workpiece is put on the spindle and secured with a native washer. Then all the blades are bent at the same angle (this was done manually, because the necessary tools were not available). It is not so difficult to bend them at one angle, you can navigate at any point. I did it just so that they were not higher than its inner wall and did not touch its lid.

4. The time has come for the hard drive cover itself, it is very easy to cut it - the marking of the future hole is made and drilled along the cutting line (easier, of course, with a dremel). Any burrs formed after drilling can be easily filed off, because HDD covers are most often made of soft metals such as brass or aluminum. After all the work, the parts of the cooler are put together.

You should end up with something like the photo below. As you can see, there is nothing complicated about this mod.

Also, if you want to make it stand out from the pile of hardware, you can illuminate it with ultra-bright LEDs that will be mounted with inside cover.

The mirror surface of the pancake (disc) will give an accurate reflection, and a pleasant "play of light" will be obtained.

What are the advantages of this mod:

Can be installed in a standard HDD slot to cool another hard drive. Considering the high speed of the spindle, it can be very effective.

It is connected with a standard power cord (molex).

Can decorate any modder's case.

What are the disadvantages:

High fan noise. This is because you need to select hard drives with quiet engines, mostly new ones, at that time this was not at hand.

There is a danger of losing limbs poked into the rotating impeller by curious friends. In my modd, I provided for this, so as not to injure myself or others - the blades of the cooler were bent in the opposite direction.

This is how you can make a cooler in a few days that will blow out all the heat generated by the hard drives. Or simply put it in a case for blowing air - both beautiful and cold! I think this mod will be a decent and functional decoration for any case. The idea, intricate at first glance, turned out to be not so difficult to implement.

P.S: For me, this mod is attractive because no one has ever used such an idea.

IvanZhdankin aka JEEP
jeeps (a) yandex.ru
7 /07.2006