DIY Copper HD Cooler, New Fan Mount.

Bluefront · Post by **Bluefront** » Sun Jan 16, 2005 5:55 pm

I had to change my hard drive setup, so I recycled this DIY hard drive cooler/dampener. It's made of soldered-together copper sheets, with all four edges of the drives touching the copper.

It sits over a bottom intake opening and has a Yate Loon fan on the top, sucking air out of the cage. Running at 800 rpms, it is completely inaudable, and keeps the two drives under 30C.

It sits on four rubber bumpers, and has a layer of foam between the bumper brackets and the copper frame.

This thing works perfectly.....but it was a diffucult project.

Four Photos

Tyrdium · Post by **Tyrdium** » Sun Jan 16, 2005 7:20 pm

Whoa, funky. Is it fastened to the case at all?

Bluefront · Post by **Bluefront** » Sun Jan 16, 2005 7:57 pm

Nope...it's pretty heavy and the four rubber feet just wedge down into four holes cut into the 3/8" foam pad covering the bottom of the case. It doesn't move around at all but you can't turn the case over because it would come out of the wedge mount.

I like to build cases that come apart easily for new ideas....

tay · Post by **tay** » Sun Jan 16, 2005 8:10 pm

Great idea, I cant ever make that. Which leads me to this.... What do you think of simply buying 1 sheet (without the holes) and folding it into a box (screwing the ends) like an origami HDD cooler. Would the surface area of the copper provide enough cooling? What thickness copper would fold easily and still support the drives. How would you fold it? So many questions

matt_garman · Post by **matt_garman** » Sun Jan 16, 2005 9:57 pm

Bluefront wrote:...It sits over a bottom intake opening and has a Yate Loon fan on the top, sucking air out of the cage. Running at 800 rpms, it is completely inaudable, and keeps the two drives under 30C.

It sits on four rubber bumpers, and has a layer of foam between the bumper brackets and the copper frame...

I wonder why case manufacturers dont do something like this by default? What you have there looks to me like a typical hard drive cage (minus the fan and rubber feet). Why not offer cases with hard drive cages that attach to the frame using rubber (or something similar)?

For example, the ever popular Antec 3700 AMB (and the 3000B) has (have) a hard drive cage that attaches to the case frame via metal (screws and levers). It seems like that design could be modified pretty easily to lock in place via rubber or bungee cords or something similar (perhaps they'd have to sacrifice space for one drive).

I know there's lots of DIY ways to achieve this, but I don't think it would be too hard for cases to come like this out of the box.

Just a thought

Matt

Bluefront · Post by **Bluefront** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 3:23 am

The problem with just folding a sheet of copper into a box shape is that is practically impossible to get all the sides square.....which is absolutely necessary to have the sides act as a heatsink.

How I did it is to use two old drives as templates, screw the cut pieces of copper to the drives, then solder everything together with the drives in the center. Of course this would probably ruin a good drive. Each drive slides out of the one end...one at a time.

The air holes are 3/4", cut with a sheet metal cutter bit, and absolutely necessary to keep the temps low, promoting airflow over every part of both drives.

A case manufacturer could make something like this easily.....but at a much higher cost due to the copper.

Link to original project

Bluefront · Post by **Bluefront** » Sun Jan 23, 2005 3:23 pm

I finalized my HD fan mount using the copper HD cage. The princible used here is the same as my previous "Bird-Cage" HD device. The two 80mm Yate Loon fans suck air out of the ventilated copper cage holding the two drives.

The fan mount was easily made of glued-together pieces of safety-mat foam, and some sticky-back foam sheets. The aluminum frame fans just wedge into the foam with no other mounting. The whole fan unit just sits on top of the copper frame....the friction of the foam keeps it from moving.

The location of the fans also provides increased cooling for the NB, video card and the two sticks of RAM.

I'm running these two fans off a controller that increases their speed based on temps....they usually run at 6V....very quietly. The NB temps fell 10C when this setup was installed. Works good....

More photos

DIY Copper HD Cooler, New Fan Mount.

DIY Copper HD Cooler, New Fan Mount.

Re: DIY Copper HD Cooler ...Revisited.