Silencing a hard drive

   If you take the noise-insulation cabinet away you can clearly see the whole construction. The heat energy is transferred from Winchesters to 10 mm aluminium plates and then to the cooling radiator. To provide better heat transfer the sides of Winchesters are smeared with a thermal paste. That seems very easy… but there is one thing we haven’t mentioned yet… It is the cooling of electronic components.
   In a word I tell about the hard disks electronics. The hard disk producers assure us that their production operates safely at the temperature up to 65° C. There is opinion that hard disk’s life time depends directly on the operation temperature. Manufacturers KEEP BACK this fact because they want us to buy their product and in such way get profit. At the temperature of 65° C the life time of hard disks is shortened two times if not more. This is fact for me.

   And there is one more important moment. The Winchester temperature gage LIES and this is planned by manufacturers. If you don’t trust me you can download Speedfan and test it on a “cold” computer. It will fail in 7-10 degrees regarding to the room temperature. Thus, you should add 10 degrees to the hard disk temperature that is read out by the programmes of the embedded detector. I don’t recommend you to bring the hard disks temperature even to 50° C. In my opinion the upper limit is 40° C.

   And I’d like to tell some words to the skeptics, about 3-year warranty… Try returning to the repair shop a Seagate or any other hard disk that has been used for one year and you’ll whether I am true or not… They will lay the blame on the poor power unit or tell you that the hard disk has been dropped from the table, having found a tiny scratching under magnifying glass. It has been tried. There is such problem even in big country, not to mention the regions. Even if your hard disk will be taken for warranty repair or by some miracle exchanged for a new one, who will restore the lost information? And information is sometimes more valuable than hardware…
   One day I rummaged in specific web sites by means of Google and read an interesting article under the title “hard disk plates polymer-ferrymagnetic sputtering crumbling speed enhancing…”. I didn’t understand all this text of that profound treatise but among the involute formulas with unknown for me parameters I got the essence of the article assigned for professionals. The author of the abstruse research asserts that the plates heat up more because the head moves along them in a high speed. That may cause the melting and crumbling of polymer surface.
    To the point, the algorithms of modern hard disks operation are so high that all beds are not visible (we’re being tricked again); hard disk just registers them in its Registry and works a bit more slowly. So, let’s figure out. The hard disk detector indicates 60° C, plus 10° C of the tricky manufacturers’ temperature gage, plus 10-20 (?)° C of the plates. In other words the plates heat up to 80-90° C! Unambiguously this is not good for polymers…