Ok guys, here is a very simple easy to follow guide to make yourself a HDD cooler at home.
Requirements
- A 80 mm fan (smaller one will do, but with lesser efficiency, BTW its just about 20 bucks difference between 60 mm and 80 mm)
- Scissors, double sided tape, box cutter, some strong thread, duct tape, ruler, pen.
- One side cardboard of a short notebook. (you might also consider sticking a white sheet on the board for marking purposes)
Procedure
1. First, draw a rectangle of 15 cm x 12 cm.
2. Join the diagonals.
3. Measure 4 cm from the compass. Draw a circle using the intersection of the diagnals as the centre.
4. Cut out the circle using the box cutter. Make sure that all the
blades of the fan are visible when the fan is kept on the cutout.
5. Mark points in the holes of the fan on the cardboard. Punch the points.
6. Stick some double sided tape on it and punch the tape with the board holes as refernce.
7. Stick the fan and press the fan on the tape for 30 secs.
8. Sew the fan tightly using some thread. (because in my first type, the fan gave away and it was lying on the floor)
9. Then, measure the width of your drive bay (usually its 10 cm) and cut
equally from both sided (for my 10 cm, cut 1 cm from each side)
paste one layer of duct tape all around it.
10. Wallah!!! You created your own hdd cooler
11. Put it into your drive bay and see if it fits.
12. Place the HDD over the cooler, you might encounter some mounting problems (it took me 5 painstaking minutes to screw the HDD.
13. Plug in your cables, power cords and start benchmarking (results may vary)
As I have observed, the top portion of the HDD will be warm, but the bottom portion will be icy cold (I’m not exaggerating)
As for the cardboard, its for providing support for the fan and
"AIRPROOFING" i.e., to make sure that only air from the air layer over
the hdd surface is sucked (improves efficency drastically )
Make sure that there is some airgap between the HDD and the cooler
You can also widen the mouth of the cooler so that more air enters the fan.
Currently, my cooler fan is running at 300 rpm below normal which
implies, all air in the airgap is being sucked which implies maximum
cooling efficiency which implies 5 degrees of the idle temperature (by
idle temperature, its the difference between the temperatures of just booted Windows XP and 1 hr of linking park and def leppard on the test hdd with 20%
cpu processing all the time.)
