In which Greg gets a "green" HDD

[Greg King]

So I have a single drive, passively cooled, QNAP NAS box (much like this one) and in that NAS is a Seagate 7200 RPM drive. All I do with this is use it's built in Twonky Media to stream videos to my PS3 in the living room.

With the normal Seagate drive in there, things got hot. Not hot enough to impact performance but it was rather warm to the touch. Having just put a pair of EADS 1TB Western Digital drives in my dual drive Synology NAS (strikingly similar to this but not this one), I liked their thermal properties so I ordered another one for the QNAP.

Having put that one in, I have shed about 8-10 degrees. I know there are performance diferances between the two drives but for what I am using it for, this series of drives is 110% appropriate.

Moral of this here story... if your looking for drive with a good balance or capacity, price and thermals, look at this drive. its incredible the differance in this NAS.

 

[Rob Williams]

It's nice to know that these drives are worth the extra few dollars... even in a desktop machine, lower temperatures is not a bad thing. You'd of course want your main drive to have speed, but storage drives don't need to be the fastest hard drives available.

 

[Ben]

With the normal Seagate drive in there, things got hot. Not hot enough to impact performance but it was rather warm to the touch. Having just put a pair of EADS 1TB Western Digital drives in my dual drive Synology NAS (strikingly similar to this but not this one), I liked their thermal properties so I ordered another one for the QNAP.

Please do explain how heat effects hard drive performance because I believe Google found that heat doesn't really make a difference.

 

[Rob Williams]

It likely doesn't affect performance, but it no doubt affects stability. I one time was forced to install a fan over the hard drive when I first got a 750GB, because it overheated (almost hit 60C), and it resulted in the PC crashing.

 

[Greg King]

Please do explain how heat effects hard drive performance because I believe Google found that heat doesn't really make a difference.

You win Ben. You called me out. Well done.

I should have stated that living in an apartment, any piece of heat generating hardware impacts my room's temperature a fair amount. For example, turning off my monitor when not in use has done wonders for my overall temperatures at night.

 

[Rob Williams]

For example, turning off my monitor when not in use has done wonders for my overall temperatures at night.

Tell me about it :-/ It's even worse in the summer.

 

[Ben]

You win Ben. You called me out. Well done.

I should have stated that living in an apartment, any piece of heat generating hardware impacts my room's temperature a fair amount. For example, turning off my monitor when not in use has done wonders for my overall temperatures at night.

I think this would make a good article, how to build a PC with cool components and how they affect room temperature. Specifically if water cooling keeps the room cooler, although you would have to have a fan or something keeping the water cool. Perhaps fans vs. water cooling on ambient air temperature could be the title of said article.

I know I've had this problem as well, beside shoving an AC unit in every window, there isn't much I can think of to solve the problem.

 

[Rob Williams]

I think it would be difficult to measure the effects of such things, because room temps can change fairly drastically even with nothing turned on in the room. It's worse when you have a room in which the sun shines into. It is an interesting idea though, and I'd be interested in some results as well. It'd be hard though... you'd essentially have to dedicate a room to testing for two days where the temperature outside and inside are equal.

Funny enough, I actually find my PS3 puts out more heat than my computers do. Once in a while, when I find the room is a little warmer than it should be, I'll look down and see the console on. It's hard to tell, because sometimes it runs quiet.

 

[Kougar]

Hm, maybe I'm misunderstanding here. It doesn't matter if you watercool a PC or air cool it, the computer will produce the exact same amount of heat and this heat is transferred into the air in the room. Before I get nitpicked apart, to be technically correct the extra fans and waterpump probably add a few watts of heat dissipation to the total, but that's negligible by comparison to the total figure.

Now, if you look at subzero cooling or even TECs.... especially TEC's, there is heat created in the effort to cool the components than if the system was just air cooled. Some of those TEC's/peltiers can add a huge amount of heat into a watercooling loop or air cooler, just about all of the energy used to power a TEC is converted to heat that'll end up in the room in some fashion.