Hard Drive Coolers... anybody use 'em?

Thinking of adding WD 120, 7200 RPM, to my system. My present 5400 RPM runs just barely warm to the touch. I've heard 7200s and faster should have separate cooling. Comments and/or recommendations? TIA

 

Just bringing this for one more shot at comments and recommendations. TIA

 

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.

I’d 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.

 

It never hurts to have more cooling. I just blew a processor building the new freebsd "world," do to overheating.

nitro

 

http://www.enterprisenetworkingmagazine.com/monthly/2003/03/integrity.shtml

http://www.heatsink-guide.com/hdcool.htm

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/qual/issuesCooling.html

 

Avoiding high heat components was my approach for my trading computer. I've been checking around for a 5400 RPM drive with 8mg cache... haven't found one yet.

I'm not sure what you mean by "extra memory for disk cache" ?? Is that something I can set in Win2000??

 

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.

 

I meant to say 600 MHz P3.

 

Sheeesh.... I'm running 15,000 RPM SCSI drives
If you wan't to see REAL system performance,
IN GENERAL, focus on the harddrives.

My applications launch so fast, you would think
they were simply minimized

I use regular drives for my "low" usage data,
and backups, etc.

peace

axeman