Hard Drive Coolers... anybody use 'em?
- Thread starter gnome
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Magna
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I've been running a variety of 7200 rpm HD's (Western Digital, Maxtor, Seagate) for a number of years, since they first came out. No separate cooling fans, never a problem. Now if I were to get a 10,000 rpm drive I would definitely want a fan on it, as those babies get quite toasty.
I always compare the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures), and tend to stay away from any hardware that runs overly hot. Fans will add vibration and noise and can fail sometimes.
Excessive heat destroys most anything, be it hard drives, CPUs, engines, and biological life, especially anything with moving parts. Hard drives are particularly vulnerable to stress because they have moving parts and will make large swings in temperature between the idle, power down state and heavy disk access.
Iâd rather get less expensive 5400 RPM drives, or a RAID configuration, and invest in extra memory for a disk cache. Power consumption, noise and temperature will all be lower, and your data will last longer.
Excessive heat destroys most anything, be it hard drives, CPUs, engines, and biological life, especially anything with moving parts. Hard drives are particularly vulnerable to stress because they have moving parts and will make large swings in temperature between the idle, power down state and heavy disk access.
Iâd rather get less expensive 5400 RPM drives, or a RAID configuration, and invest in extra memory for a disk cache. Power consumption, noise and temperature will all be lower, and your data will last longer.
Recent versions of Windows (2K, XP, etc.) will take unused system memory and use it for disk caching.
So for most people, having an extra 256 or 512 MB of system memory instead of a faster hard drive will make the entire system respond faster, even though accessing un-cached data is a bit slower. If you are doing data-intensive operations like video editing, a faster hard drive becomes more important.
I have a 600 MHz P4 with 1 GB ram, and 5400 RPM drives, and it's every bit as responsive for all applications (except CPU-intensive trading system simulation) as my 2.5 GHz P4 with 512 MB ram and a 7200 RPM drive. If the hardware and OS are properly configured, you can get a lot of work done with only a 300 MHz CPU.
