I've known about the tiny "drive holes" (sometimes called "breather ports") on internal hard drives and the warning against covering or obstructing them for years, but it was never an issue for me in the past since I always installed these drives inside my computer cases (as almost everyone does). Installing them that way made the warning moot, since computer cases are designed to provide ample room below/above each internal drive.
But now I have so many unmounted internal SATA drives that I can't install them all inside my computers' cases, and in any case I need to be able to arbitrarily switch them around and connect and disconnect them directly to my various computers' mobos at will.
I do this primarily (but not only) for backup purposes on my several XP Pro boxes: Using Acronis Disk Director 10, I can make an exact, bit-for-bit duplicate of a 1 TB hard drive (or any individual partitions on it) to another drive or another partition on the same drive in 10 minutes or less! That capability has, as one might expect, dramatically increased my willingness to back up my data on a daily basis, something that is particularly important because I use RAID 0 (striping) arrays quite a lot, which, although risky, increases the transfer rates and related disk speed attributes considerably.
But DD 10 allows that level of speed only if I connect the backup drive directly to a mobo's internal SATA port(s). I've long since given up on external drive enclosures because the intermediary USB, Firewire, or even eSATA interfaces dramatically slows down access and increases the DD 10 backup time from minutes to hours or even days in extreme instances! This is an empirical observation given the products I own; I understand that the theoretical speed of these various interfaces -- especially eSATA -- shouldn't cause such a severe reduction in speed. (One reason for the slow-down relates to the device drivers involved; If you're able to use the "Safe Mode" (an inapt name) of DD 10, the speeds are incredibly high, but Safe Mode pretty much only works with the lowest-level (and hence essentially driverless) disk-to-disk I/O mode. If you're copying / backing-up to external drives or drives with an extra layer of interface between the internally-connected hard disk and the backup device, you often need to use DD 10's "Full Mode", which is usually much slower because it needs to employ device drivers for the I/O).
With that background laid out, I can finally get to my questions:
(1): What is the minimum clearance I must allow so as not to obstruct the drive holes/breather ports? I have a small workspace and so I've been placing the drives either directly on the desk or stacked right on top of each other. It finally dawned on my tiny little mind that this is probably a bad idea.
(2): What is the purpose of these drive holes? My guess is that they're necessary to equalize the internal and external air pressure (such as would be caused by the drive changing temperature relative to the ambient room temperature) rather than to cool the drives per se, due to the sensitivity of the airflow for maintaining the flying height of the heads, but I could be wrong about that so I need to know the facts.
(3): Is dust an issue for these drive holes? I started working with hard disk drives and magnetic drum storage early on (mid 70's), and I've seen the classic diagram of the enormous relative size of dust particles compared to head-to-platter distances (which have only gotten shorter over time) several hundred times in those days (the only copy of the diagram I could find online in a short span of time was in .tdk media format, and the only player I could find runs only under 16-bit versions of Windows, which isn't available as an option even under XP Pro's compatibility modes...) The room these drives are in is rather dusty; how concerned should I be?
(4): How big an issue is drive cooling under these circumstances? My hunch is that the greatest overheating risk associated with internal hard drives comes from the fact that they're usually installed inside computer cases, and so their proximity to the power supply, CPU, and motherboard substantially increases the operating temperatures of the internally mounted hard drives (the only Click of Death or other fatal hard drive failures I've personally encountered were on drives that were mounted inside a case.) Therefore, it seems to me that since the drives I'm talking about are not inside any cases, I needn't be concerned at all about providing cooling fans or whatnot as long as the ambient temperature in the room stays within a human-comfortable range. Am I right about that?
If I need to provide additional cooling for these unmounted drives, I have few good and affordable options. I tried the Sans Digital HDDRACK5, but as the review on that page indicates, it's too poor a design to accommodate my needs, especially considering how often I swap drives around (which resulted more than once with literal drive crashes when one drive collapsed onto another due to the product's poor design).
The only other option that looks promising is the Ziotek Hard Drive Gasket (here's a YouTube video demonstration). But it provides only passive cooling, which would be no better (and might be worse) than what I'm doing now. There's one principal advantage, though: It wouldn't obstruct any drive holes (assuming I'm obstructing them now).
Thoughts, anyone?
But now I have so many unmounted internal SATA drives that I can't install them all inside my computers' cases, and in any case I need to be able to arbitrarily switch them around and connect and disconnect them directly to my various computers' mobos at will.
I do this primarily (but not only) for backup purposes on my several XP Pro boxes: Using Acronis Disk Director 10, I can make an exact, bit-for-bit duplicate of a 1 TB hard drive (or any individual partitions on it) to another drive or another partition on the same drive in 10 minutes or less! That capability has, as one might expect, dramatically increased my willingness to back up my data on a daily basis, something that is particularly important because I use RAID 0 (striping) arrays quite a lot, which, although risky, increases the transfer rates and related disk speed attributes considerably.
But DD 10 allows that level of speed only if I connect the backup drive directly to a mobo's internal SATA port(s). I've long since given up on external drive enclosures because the intermediary USB, Firewire, or even eSATA interfaces dramatically slows down access and increases the DD 10 backup time from minutes to hours or even days in extreme instances! This is an empirical observation given the products I own; I understand that the theoretical speed of these various interfaces -- especially eSATA -- shouldn't cause such a severe reduction in speed. (One reason for the slow-down relates to the device drivers involved; If you're able to use the "Safe Mode" (an inapt name) of DD 10, the speeds are incredibly high, but Safe Mode pretty much only works with the lowest-level (and hence essentially driverless) disk-to-disk I/O mode. If you're copying / backing-up to external drives or drives with an extra layer of interface between the internally-connected hard disk and the backup device, you often need to use DD 10's "Full Mode", which is usually much slower because it needs to employ device drivers for the I/O).
With that background laid out, I can finally get to my questions:
(1): What is the minimum clearance I must allow so as not to obstruct the drive holes/breather ports? I have a small workspace and so I've been placing the drives either directly on the desk or stacked right on top of each other. It finally dawned on my tiny little mind that this is probably a bad idea.
(2): What is the purpose of these drive holes? My guess is that they're necessary to equalize the internal and external air pressure (such as would be caused by the drive changing temperature relative to the ambient room temperature) rather than to cool the drives per se, due to the sensitivity of the airflow for maintaining the flying height of the heads, but I could be wrong about that so I need to know the facts.
(3): Is dust an issue for these drive holes? I started working with hard disk drives and magnetic drum storage early on (mid 70's), and I've seen the classic diagram of the enormous relative size of dust particles compared to head-to-platter distances (which have only gotten shorter over time) several hundred times in those days (the only copy of the diagram I could find online in a short span of time was in .tdk media format, and the only player I could find runs only under 16-bit versions of Windows, which isn't available as an option even under XP Pro's compatibility modes...) The room these drives are in is rather dusty; how concerned should I be?
(4): How big an issue is drive cooling under these circumstances? My hunch is that the greatest overheating risk associated with internal hard drives comes from the fact that they're usually installed inside computer cases, and so their proximity to the power supply, CPU, and motherboard substantially increases the operating temperatures of the internally mounted hard drives (the only Click of Death or other fatal hard drive failures I've personally encountered were on drives that were mounted inside a case.) Therefore, it seems to me that since the drives I'm talking about are not inside any cases, I needn't be concerned at all about providing cooling fans or whatnot as long as the ambient temperature in the room stays within a human-comfortable range. Am I right about that?
If I need to provide additional cooling for these unmounted drives, I have few good and affordable options. I tried the Sans Digital HDDRACK5, but as the review on that page indicates, it's too poor a design to accommodate my needs, especially considering how often I swap drives around (which resulted more than once with literal drive crashes when one drive collapsed onto another due to the product's poor design).
The only other option that looks promising is the Ziotek Hard Drive Gasket (here's a YouTube video demonstration). But it provides only passive cooling, which would be no better (and might be worse) than what I'm doing now. There's one principal advantage, though: It wouldn't obstruct any drive holes (assuming I'm obstructing them now).
Thoughts, anyone?
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