May 01, 2004
USB 2.0 External Enclosure
I recently bought external enclosures for two 250GB drives I bought. These drives store my home video collection.
The drives are very attractive and the construction is solid. The casing is aluminum, which should dissipate heat well. However, after running two drives stacked for 8 hours, I was sure I could have fried an egg on the top drive.
So, I unstacked them and put their flush side on top of a meat and fish thawing board I own. The drives have been running for 16 hours and they are merely warm. I wanted to avoid a fan, but I suppose a fan combined with this setup would cool the drives rather well.
You can see my setup here:
A somewhat brief review of the enclosure I bought is shown here:
http://www.3dxtreme.net/index.php?id=bytecc3.5enclosure1
I wish they would have went into more detail about cooling scenarios. Anyway, one thing I noticed about my rig is that the drives never seem to spin down. Perhaps they do and I’m not aware. Under Windows XP, the drives do become offline after a period and I have to go into “Administrative Tools” to “Reactivate” the disks since the drive letters disappear. I would expect the drives to cool to room temperature when they go offline, but this does not seem to happen. So, I assume the drives are not actually spinning down. Any insight from anyone?
UPDATE: Someone on a newsgroup informed me that these thawing boards are merely aluminum with a black surface. From the feel of the board, I would say this sounds correct. In any case, I also found that having a single drive on allowed the drive to stay room-temperature cool, which is better than searing hot!
Posted by Nick Codignotto at May 1, 2004 12:16 PM | TrackBackPosted to General
