SPCR

I have a few cases with a fan in front of the hard drives and in some cases, I'm using this item from Scythe:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835185020

System is already pretty low wattage, so I tend to just put the hard drives in standby when not in use.

I'd like the fan for the drives to be either on or off depending on the drive status.

Any ideas on the best way to do this?

Maybe a thermal sensor attached to surface of the HD case that cycles a fan when heat is detected?

Good idea.

Haven't seen an on/off type of thermal control though (but will look). The majority seems to allow some voltage through (ala FanMate or Thermistor on the fan itself) and don't have a temp threshold. Might have to build something.

Maybe more complicated, but had an idea that could handle a couple of other situations.

Was thinking of a Sunbeam Theta and use SpeedFan to control it. Not sure how well the Theta works with SpeedFan and looking into that as well.

if your drives use SMART technology you can set up Speedfan to do what you want assuming you can control fans hooked up to your MB with speedfan.

Have one of your fans tied to the hard drive temp. Set the minimum fanspeed to 0% and the maximum to whatever you want. Set the target temperture higher than the idle temps and you're set.

That's the problem. The motherboard (A8N VM CSM) only allows the CPU fan header to be controlled.

The one other fan header doesn't allow control via speedfan.

Hence, I'd like to try and tie in the motherboard/S.M.A.R.T temperatures to an external fan controller as an overall soltion.

Otherwise the on/off thermal sensor looks to be the simplest (if I can find one).

My Asus AN8's uGuru fan control in the BIOS setup is something all MBs should have. Voltage range adjustments dependant on temperature delta, user definable with 6 independently controlled fan headers.

I don't know of any motherboard BIOS that accesses SMART or GPU temps directly to control fan speed. Seems obvious though.

It seems on the uATX boards (which the ASUS A8N VM CSM is) they back off on these features (and sometimes quality) automatically assuming it isn't for the enthusist market.

This is something I found in common with MSI, Abit, and ASUS.

You can do this procedure easily using a DigitalDoc5 fan controller. You attach one of the eight sensors to the side of the hard drive. You attach the fan to that channel. Then you adjust the turn on point to slightly above the hard drive idle temp. Every time the drive gets above that temp the fan will turn on.