Harddrives: Lengthwise or Sideways?

[MOB109]

I see that a lot of new cases have the harddrives mounted sideways, with the cords pointing to the side of the case. In my mind this looks a lot more ineffecient for cooling and general air intake than mounting them lengthwise in the classic manner. The sideways style looks like it blocks a lot of incoming air by forcing the incoming air to blow right into the side of the harddrive cage, rather thatn through it with a lengthwise setup.

What are other peoples opinions on this? Am I wrong in my assumptions?

 

[JMecc]

My sideways-mounted drives stay pretty cool, even with a stack of 4 on top of each other I get 28-38C temps. It sure makes swapping hd's easier since you don't have to unscrew from both sides & the slide out straight into the mobo connections. I agree that the lengthwise would provide better cooling (although this would be very marginal - fractions of a degree), but the convenience is awesome.

Jo

 

[Nitro350Z]

I have my hd's lengthwise in my Lian-Li. The drive cage is really great as you just unscrew 2 thumb screws and it slides right out of the case sideways, no need to mess around inside the case like you mentioned. Now if only every case had a feature like this.

 

[celewign]

Does it really matter that much? I have only needed to d!ck around with the HDDs twice, when I built the machine and when I threw in a bigger drive. Some people might swap a lot, but most of us don't, and really don't care whether our hard drives are easy to take out and such.

Not to spatz on JMecc, but I don't really think it matters.
-cm

 

[sailer]

I used to have a Dell which mounted the C: drive lengthwise and the D: drive sideways. The sideways drive was hotter to the touch, though I never measured the total difference in degrees. Never had a case since that mounted a drive sideways.