External Hard Drives and Cooling

[PimpingBox]

Just wondering why External Hard Drives are more expansive...Whats unique about them? And do people really need cooling for the hard drive or is the case cooling enough? thx.. 8)

[Capper]

Good questions.

External drives are more expensive for a couple reasons. first, they are encased in an enclosure...which usually has a fan....this costs extra. Then you have to add in the interface between the HDD/Enclosure/ Your system. Be it IEEE1394, USB, or SATA...it costs money. then most external HDD come with bundled software to back up data and such...which costs money.

As to your second question, it all depends upon your case and the air flow. some cases have good airflow around the HDD (Cooler Master comes to mind), some do not (Silverstone comes to mind). Generally, a case with a fan in front of the HDD rack is ideal.

[PimpingBox]

How about raptor hard drives, running at 10 000 rpms? Does it heat up easily? and those little cube cases, are those the kind of cases i would want a external hard drive for it?

(Thanks for the tips on External Hard drives, good to know)

[Tyreal]

I have a Raptor and a fan cools it fine. In almost all cases, a fan blowing air across it will provide adequet cooling.

Those small cases (Small Form Factor) usually have pretty good cooling if you route your wires well. An external hard drive would certainly be a nice addition if you don't mind spending a little more money.

[gvblake22]

I would not use an external HDD in place of a traditional internal HDD though (like one that you boot from). It would probably be best to keep any bootable HDD installed in your case and use external hard drives for things like backups and mass storage.

As far as HDD cooling goes, it is somewhat necessary, but not to the point where you need heatpipes and water cooling blocks. Usually an unrestricted fan blowing air over them is enough. But I would have to disagree with Capper when he said that Cooler Master tends to have good airflow over the HDD cages and Silverstone does not. It is going to be completely dependant on the specific case from each company. Cooler Master has plenty of cases with poor airflow over the hard drive cage and Silverstone has cases with great airflow over the HDD's. It is just a matter of checking out the layout of each case and deciding for yourself if it suits your needs. If it doesn't, then find another case or get ready for some modding! :D

I have a 10,000 RPM Raptor as well as two other 7,200 RPM Seagate drives and while all of them get kinda warm around the edges, I have never felt them get alarmingly hot. As long as you have some decent airflow (which most any name brand case will have), you shouldn't have to worry too much about HDD cooling (although it is always good to still keep an eye on things to make sure everything is running withing a satisfactory temperature range).

[Tyreal]

I've actually experienced some serious hard drive problems due to overheating. My computer would constantly crashing as well as files would not save and become corrupted.

In case you were curious... my raptor temperature right now is: 24C and my Maxtor is at 29C. It's strange that my raptor is actually lower in temp.

Having an external HDD in place of an internal mass storage HDD would be awesome. Theres nothing like having files and bringing them to a friends house or to your other computer to use/install. You can do the same with internal storage hard drives, but you will need to unscrew the hard drive or remove the cage.

[gvblake22]

Originally Posted by Tyreal

Having an external HDD in place of an internal mass storage HDD would be awesome. Theres nothing like having files and bringing them to a friends house or to your other computer to use/install. You can do the same with internal storage hard drives, but you will need to unscrew the hard drive or remove the cage.

Very true, I totally agree. They are just not really good for running an OS on though...