External HD heat dissipation

[hassegubben]

TIP: I just bought a Gigapod HD enclosure and a Seagate 7200.7 200 GB HD. The HD has 5 year warranty bought separately. Buying a pre-built external HD only has 1 year warranty.
My only concern is: the enclosure lacks fans, but the Seagate HD is known for low heat dissipation. I just wanted tor hear other peoples experiences in the area. Will the alu-enclosure remove enough heat when used over a long time (e.g. 24 hour a day encoding)?

[neo75903]

maybe it dissapates heat through its case? Thenit would be ok, otherwise kinda risky.

[hassegubben]

Anybody who knows if there exist software for monitoring a USB2 HD with Win XP?

[rca29]

Last month, i was going to buy an external enclosure but i ended up buyng a PCI IDE controller card instead. ( in order to put the HDD inside the pc). I'm a member of a forum where people have a lot of HD's, and some of them as external USB.
From what i've been told, a good aluminum enclosure will be safe for your hardrive, but as you know there are a number of cheap External HD enclosures, and those eat HD's for breakfast. So, try to find some reviews on your enclosure and see if you can find bad things about it.

I don't know if it works on USB, but for IDE i use the free version of HDD Thermometer

You can try www.rsfsoft.com and see if it will do it for you.

:)

[Angelus]

The best external enclosures you can buy are Bytecc and Apricorn. Bytecc is cheaper than the other one but makes good external enclosures. I dont really know how much warmer they get than internal ones but it will be fine, especially if its a seagate. And for me I have 3 internal drives stack ontop of one another so airflow around them is little to none, and they're fine. My dad bought 2 Bytecc enclosures and 2 Seagates HDD's and they've been fine.

[rca29]

Originally posted by Angelus
... And for me I have 3 internal drives stack ontop of one another so airflow around them is little to none, and they're fine.

Are you sure about that ? Do you have any software reading the HDD temps ?
Don't forget that most (if not all) PC cases have a lot of fans that always allow airflow. Just to give you my personal example, my pc has the case fan, the fan from the power supply (which also removes heat from inside the case) and the processor cooler (zalman in my pc) which all create a lot of airflow.
One year ago, i used my pc with one of the lateral covers of for a few months. It's true that nothing happened, but one day i touch one HDD with my fingers and it was really hot. Then i re-installed the lateral cover and it cooled a lot (felt like cold to my fingers).
When i installed the HDD Thermometer, i realized that if i removed one lateral panel, the HDD would reach 45 degrees C. With the case closed, they run around 25-29 Degrees C. It's a lot of diference (considering the recommended temps for HDD).
In my quest for a more silent computer, i tried to disconnect the rear 10 cm case fan, but the temperature of the whole pc (processor, HDD, etc.) increased a lot (even with the good airflow from the power supply.

As a bottom line, and if you take a look at www.silentpcreview.com , in order to keep low temps on your pc you need to have airflow or something like the Zalman's case (very expensive) that is all made of aluminum (if i'm not mistaken) and has special construction patterns in order to do an excellent heat tranfer.
Heat is the worst enemy of HDD's.

[Angelus]

Well I've done encoding on my hard disks for longer than 12 hours in a row and had them on for more than 24 hours and they've been fine. I have an aluminum case for my PC and it radiates the heat pretty well too. My primary HD's are 2 Western Digital ones in raid 0 and my other one is a seagate mainly for storage. I've built this PC over a year ago and haven't had any problems with heat in regards to hard drives or anything else. Anyways manufactorers when they make external hard drives simply use the standard 3.5" ide drives they sell for internal computers...(I think) all they do is put a case around it with a ide->usb 2 converter. The brands I recommended use aluminum casing which help radiate the heat better than most ones u can buy in the stores.

Edit: And I would say movement is the worst enemy of all hd's, if one head smashes into a platter than ur HD is toast.

[neo75903]

WD hd temps are ok in general, maxtors are horrible, they tend to dissapate a lot of heat.