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Fanless external HD cases. Will they shorten the life of the hard drive?
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Feb 2001
Location: Canaduh
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Offline
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Macally makes some nice external hard drive cases. They're made of aluminum and don't have fans. While the idea of a relatively silent external hard drive sounds nice, I'm concerned that the lack of the fan will substantially shorten the life of the hard drive.
Do 7200 RPM (16 MB buffer) hard drives need to be cooled by a fan or will the aluminum enclosure suffice at transferring the heat away from the drive?
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Downtown Austin, TX
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The aluminum enclosure will be plenty. Hard drives inside computer cases actually get much hotter because of the combined heat of every component. Hard drives are only 10-15W or less... compare that to a MacBook at around 45W idle (just guessing) and then take into consideration that a MacBook's fans rarely come on, and you'll realize the hard drive inside a laptop or even desktop is subjected to higher temperatures.
I have a Macally Firewire400/USB 2.0 5.25" enclosure with a 60GB 7200rpm drive in there, and it runs very cool.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Feb 2001
Location: Canaduh
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Awesome. Thanks.
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Mar 1999
Location: Bellevue, WA
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I have 2 fanless hard drive enclosures sit next to each other. One is made by LaCie and the other one is from OWC. They work flawlessly.
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: Teaneck, NJ
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AT&T iPhone 5S and 6; 13" MBP; MDD G4.
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Administrator  Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: San Antonio TX USA
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I'd still make sure the enclosure had plenty of free space on ALL sides so it doesn't get much warmer than ambient room temperature. I may be a bit cautious on this because of the number of drives (particularly WD, but some Maxtors too) that I've seen die because they got just a little too hot.
I have a NAS box with a thermostat-controlled fan, and transferring a lot of data to/from it over the network made the fan come on a lot the other evening-lots of drive activity = lots more heat generation. Sitting next to me is a PC with the covers off, and its 80GB Maxtor IDE drive is noticably warm to the touch. The Maxtor SATA I had in the machine (while finding out that this motherboard doesn't really support booting from a SATA drive) got downright HOT-even with the covers off, even sitting idle. Tread lightly and check the enclosure's temperature often if you're using it a lot.
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Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
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