5 1/4 HDD cooling mount I made

[sombunall]

After feeling the heat of a voltage regulator and some metal can transistors on the underside of my 10 meg drive I wanted cooling while I exercise my MFM drive collection. I came up with this. It uses an epson 5 1/4" adapter for 3.5" drives with no front (any floppy adapter would have worked but I don't have many metal ones), meccano and 92mm fan with nuts/screws. I know the airflow isn't so good with only a 5mm space below the fan but it seems to work well enough. If was going to get serious I could cut a hole in the bottom and use longer meccano with right angled feet. No new holes were drilled to make this.

 

[NathanAllan]

Excellent! Any airflow is better than none, and yeah those drives do tend to get hot. Great job! It fits the bill.

 

[strollin]

Neat idea. I'm no expert in thermal cooling but I think a vertical mounted fan that would draw cool air from one end and exhaust hot air at the other would be more efficient in this case. I wonder if this type of fan would work better? Wouldn't be too hard to adapt it to your design.

It would be interesting to do some temp measurements to see what the before and after temps are.

 

[sombunall]

Neat idea. I'm no expert in thermal cooling but I think a vertical mounted fan that would draw cool air from one end and exhaust hot air at the other would be more efficient in this case. I wonder if this type of fan would work better? Wouldn't be too hard to adapt it to your design.

I guess you've never seen the Antec MX-1 then? They use a horizonal design so they can get away with a bigger fan that turns slower. I have it and it's great. Sometimes I use audio microphones to document the audio/EM so noise is an issue.

Antec MX-1
http://www.thegadgetblog.net/2008/02/20/the-antec-mx-1-actively-cooled-hard-drive-enclosure/

 

[strollin]

You'll notice that the MX-1 has vents and slots to channel the air so it's doing more like what I was saying. The point is to have a controlled airflow, cool air in, hot air out. Probably not worth over engineering in this case.

 

[Old Thrashbarg]

You're right that the horizontal fan with no channeling isn't going to be as efficient as the other design, but any airflow is a lot better than no airflow, and a 92mm fan is going to move a lot more air than two 40mm fans, so you probably still end up with a net gain in cooling anyway, even with the lower overall efficiency. (One 92mm fan is also a lot better for the ears than two 40mm fans, though I dunno if that would really matter much when an MFM drive is involved.)

 

[gerrydoire]

I'd paint the metal pieces silver and use the same screws, for esthetics!