Case fan questions/cooling my hdd. Please help soothe my paranoia!

[JacksonVFR]

My Aspire Dreamer II case had an 80mm intake fan on the window side, and an 80mm exhaust on the top. I needed more airflow (and especially cooling to my hard drive), so to balance it out I added two; one 80mm intake fan in front and one 80mm exhaust in back.

My questions are really simple, I'm just hoping to clear up some paranoia (I tend to overthink things). I'll list them to make this real quick:

1) The front fan is about 1/2" from my hdd, and the hdd is vertically about dead center of the fan. Is this unsafe, especially in dry weather (i.e. spark when starting up system)?
2) The power cable I'm using is powering all 4 fans, plugged into one another. The other plug is going into my hdd. Is this a potential problem?
3) Can a faulty fan kill another component?
4) Cooling the hdd: 80mm case fan in front vs hdd mounted fan?

 

[paparazi]

JacksonVFR


1) Spark!!! it would take many thousands of volts to jump a half inch gap, even if that were an issue and it's not.
Case fans don't use brushes or a commutator, so don't have a physical moving connection carrying the current, as such they do not procuce a spark of any kind.

2) Typical case fans only consume between 1 and 3 watts at 12volts so even 4 fans together are well within the limits of supply of one molex connector.
HDD plugged into the other? not sure what you mean but again a single hard drive on a molex is well within the molex supply capabilities.

3) Like any component it could possibly dead short with the potential to blow the power supply but in all my years I've never seen a fan be the cause of anything apart from overheating of a component due to non cooling.

4)HDD coolers are more direct but in most setups not necessary.
A front lower fan blowing across the drive is nearly always sufficient and aids overall case cooling as well.

Maartin

We like members to GIVE and not just TAKE.
Participate and help others.

 

[JacksonVFR]

Wow, thanks paparazi! Yeah, I know some of my questions were a bit silly, specifically the first one. You see, I had a HDD literally catch on fire on startup a few months ago (it's useless now, of course). At the time, I had a case fan in the front and I've read that for my Dreamer II case, the acrylic panel in front is prone to building up static. Yeah, so I did a lot of ignorant connect-the-dots and thought maybe that's what happened. I still don't know what caused that HDD fire/failure.

About number 2, I meant that from the same power cable (I have one of those detachable PSUs, use only the number of cables you need) I have I believe my floppy drive, hard drive and all four fans connected. Each of the three things going to their own molex connector. I didn't know if I arranged that properly is all.

Thanks for the answers!!!

 

[JacksonVFR]

Oh also, if anybody else wants to elaborate on using a case fan next to a hard drive, I'd appreciate it. My fan blows both under and over the drive. Am I going to have problems with dust buildup on the circuit board/base side of my HDD?

Should I move the HDD to a higher or lower bay? Thanks!

 

[edfair]

You are fine with the power.

Sometimes they crash and burn. I've seen them with pretty little flames about the size of a birthday candle, but that was when they had larger resistors on the board.

Don't think you'll build up too much dust. But you may want to keep the machine at least 6" off the floor. Those put directly on the floor pick up more dirt than the elevated ones.

I suspect that you are being overly cautious.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[SkipCox]

IMO your hdd and front fan are precisely where they need to be. As to your other ?'s, I agree with every word Martin and Ed wrote in their replys.

As an aside, my hdd lightshow came from an old 2.1Gb WD when a rather large smr went off...looked like someone was welding inside the case for a few seconds. Scary, but no damage to anything else in the machine.

Skip

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