SPCR

I recently had an idea about HD heatsinks and Im not sure if its worth while. Here is an example I whipped up in 3dsmax6.





Its a piece of copper bent at a 90deg angle to fit the height of the drive, and use all 5 screws. The other pieces could be aluminum U-channel attached with a thermal adhesive or with thermal paste and JB Weld (recommended in another thread).

Any comments?

3dsmax6 @ 2700 pounds !!!!!!!!!!!!! Holy Cow

It looks like a good idea but im not sure whether a HDD dissapates the most heat from the top or the sides.

Also adding these heatsinks would make it difficult to mount the drive

looks effective, the vertical orientation of the fins will allow far more natural conevection and as such should cool well.

Rather than use U-channel, it's probably an idea to buy a couple of budget CPU sinks (or rip them off an old 486 or something) and cut those up. I only suggest this because cooling is all about surface area, and these will provide far, far more.

Secondly, i attached my heatsinks to my hard drive with thermal paste in the middle, superglue in the corners and it seems to be perfectly effective.
If you were to find cheap copper heatsinks, soldering them to the baseplate would be very feasible.

Would you "lap" the sides of your drive?

griff

Dirge Im pretty sure most of the heat is dissipated from the sides. Another Phil submitted an article a while ago testing a few heatsinks and HD sandwiches. He concluded that the sides were hotter. They also feel hotter.

Yeah, I tried to think of other types of heatsinks that I could cut up and attach to the side but I also want to keep it small enough to fit in a 5 1/4" bay if necessary. I dont think I would lap the drive, but probably the copper plate and the aluminum to get good contact. It might be overkill if the drive has 'some' airflow, but might be quite effective in extremely low or no airflow cases.

Hopefully Ill be able to find some copper plates somewhere near by and try this out. Or anyone else if you have some time

How thick should the copper plate be?

that is like the exact same think that are built onto high end 10,000 or 15,000RPM scsi or sata raptor drives. They work well at dissapating the heat. Great idea.

PhilgB wrote:Dirge Im pretty sure most of the heat is dissipated from the sides. Another Phil submitted an article a while ago testing a few heatsinks and HD sandwiches. He concluded that the sides were hotter. They also feel hotter.

I think you're talking about this Philip Dayson article.

Where can I get this "aluminum u-channel" stuff?

rtsai wrote:Where can I get this "aluminum u-channel" stuff?

Try home depot or other such hardware stores.