Thanks Liam, They are in aluminium enclosures, which are hot to the touch, so I guess they are pretty effective heat sinks in themselves. I did think about making a small enclosure to hold both HDDs with a fan at one end, but I'm not sure which is best:
- Individual aluminium enclosures, good heat sinks due to HDD in contact with case. - or HDD suspended in a 'tunnel' enclosure with a slow moving fa at one end of the tunnel drawing air over them. Cheers for the input. Jon Reynolds (j0nr) On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 03:10:36PM +0100, Liam Proven wrote: > On 28 July 2010 08:12, Jon Reynolds <maill...@jcrdevelopments.com> wrote: > > Hello all, > > > > I have set up an old laptop to act as a small home server at home, the > > idea being that it is quiet and low powered to be left on basically > > 24/7. > > > > Storage was an issue as I wanted it to act as a file server for music > > and somewhere to store my photos, videos etc. So in the end I have 2 > > external aluminium USB enclosures for 3.5" HDDs. > > > > The problem with this is that they are 'on' constantly as there doesn't > > seem to be any way of powering them down after a period of inactivity. > > Therefore they are HOT all the time and I am concerned this may be > > killing them. > > Broadly, heat doesn't kill drives, vibration does. Changes in heat are > not good, though: warm but stable is not too bad. > > Put your external cases on legs so there is good airflow, maybe direct > a fan across them when it's hot, or use cases with heatsinks or > cooling fans. > > Citation: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub32774.html > > -- > Liam Proven ? Profile & links: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven > Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lpro...@gmail.com > Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 > AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508 > > -- > ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/ -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
