Silencing a hard drive

   I think we must pay more attention to our hard disks electronics cooling if we are interested in good working conditions of the hard disk and information safety. We’ll not practice self-deception as the manufacturers do. Let’s determine the upper limit of disk temperature of 40° C.
   You can see in the photograph the implementation of additional cooling of radioelements. A small heat remover is tightened to each heated chip. It transfers the heat to the radiator.

 These micro heat removers are made of pieces of aluminium sheet. It’s a little more difficult to fit their height.., but I coped with it easily using pieces of non-ferrous metal 1.5 – 3 mm thick.

   The heat removers for the second hard disk are made in the same way. They are sticked to a 3 mm plate which is situated between two hard disks. (It is marked with the arrow)
   The butt-ends of the side plates ate thoroughly leveled and fitted to radiator in order to provide better contact and heat transfer. I made final fitting of Winchesters basket to the radiator having fastened two broken hard disks instead of regular ones. Before assembling I smeared the parts with thermal paste.

   The mini heat removers are shown in the photograph in full view. I glued them to the radiator by “AllSeal” thermal glue. For better heat contact they are smeared with thermal paste and interlayed with transistor layers.

   Testing recommendations. Hard disks is warmed up slowly because of its design features. It reaches its operating temperature in an hour of running. To test the efficiency of such modded cooling system you should let the hard disk get warmed thoroughly and then do 2-3 hour defragmentation or repeated virus scanning. In my case at the room temperature of 20° C and 3 hours of programmes running the Winchester temperature doesn’t exceed 36° C. The construction that I made and described has been in operation for more than half a year. The Hard disks temperature didn’t exceed 45° C even in the hottest summer days. There was no noise. At all. If you rest your ear to the system unit you can catch the chatter of the heads.