I've been fretting for a while now about my hard disk temperatures. The larger Western Digital 250Gb has been creeping up to 54 degrees as the weather got warmer, which was enough to worry me a bit.

I'm reluctant to add another fan, as this box sits in the corner of the Lounge and runs all day. I've worked on keeping it as quiet as possible so I thought I'd try a different approach.

I popped the front moulding off the case and examined the metal plate underneath. It had a circular collection of punched holes towards the bottom of the plate but other than that there were only the slots filled with cd/dvd & floppy drives. Seemed to me there was a choke point in my cooling system right there, so I went to work with screwdriver and pliers to remove a couple of the punch-out metal rectangles mid-way down the metal plate. This had the effect of opening a disk-sized aperture in the plate just about in line with the hard disks.

Replaced the front bezel moulding and restarted the system. I'm pleased to report that the WD 250 temperature has dropped to 46 degrees. An 8 degree improvement that makes me much happier about it's projected lifetime.

System still looks the same but the airflow is considerably improved. I'm a happy bunny now. As a bonus the change in airflow routes means that less dust and fluff is going to be drawn into the optical and floppy drives.

:NW_clap:

Dai_Nasty

-=| David |=-

We're not going away anytime soon...