How necessary is cooling on hard drives?

I am considering doing a but of modding for my corsair 500r, I was thinking about moving my 2 hard drives into unused 5.25" bays using some brackets I would make myself. I raised this with a friend who started telling me of all these horror stories of hard drives overheating and "melting down" (not literally, but dying because of the heat) at his works server and so on. I somehow doubt I have much to worry about in my computer when the hard drives are hardly being stressed or anything, but I just want do confirm that there is little risk in placing my hard drive somewhere else. Its no t to say they wont have cooling, they just wont be sandwiched between 2 fans any more.

Thanks

I'd seriously doubt it would be a problem.

I normally use a low RPM fan blowing over my hard drives. But when I disconnect the fan, temps rise only slightly and not into a danger zone.

Of course, use a monitoring program to inspect your temps.

Your drives can drop dead at any moment and if they do, your friend would probably tell you that the failure was heat-related--with no evidence.

If I recall correctly, Google's huge study on hard drive longevity didn't show that HD temps were critical unless they got very high.

I have considered making a custom bracket for a 120mm fan to suck air over them through the front mesh, although that could be difficult. I shall monitor the temps for a while though. My concern is that I have about 1/5tb of data, and I dont want to loose about 1tb of that, but I am too poor to afford anything to back it up to, if my main drive fails I am absolutely screwed :P It should be fairly high quality though, a Western Digital Caviar Black, and I have only had it about a year, I am hoping it is going to last a few more years :P

Anything I am doing at the moment has to be extremely cheap, technically I am in negative money considering I owe some to my parents for the purchase of the graphics card. Also, Newegg only ships within America So here in New Zealand, I have no luck :P. I'm not too worried about my hard drives, I dont believe they have any reason or likely hood of dying all of a sudden, but I just dont want to do anything overly risky. It shouldnt be too hard to make a mount for a fan, I have a spare 120mm or 140mm I could use from my old case.

My hard drives are currently in the tooless bays, sandwiched between 2 120mm fans, they are almost cold to the touch. I just want to make the inside of my case look a little tidier, and I figure if I move my 2 hard drives into the 2 unused 5.25" bays that should clean things up nicely, however there wont be room for adjacent fans, I would have to put 1 at the back of the 5.25" bay section that sucked air through the front mesh across the hard drives and through the fan, exhausting onto my ram (which being overclocked may not be the best thing, but I doubt the air will get very hot, if anything it will be good for it).

here's what i put on my drives and thay stay nice and cool ..

Newegg.com - Thermaltake A2427 Hard drive blue LED cooler






scrooge

Cooling's a great idea for hard drives so don't hesitate :) It can even double the lifespan or "resurrect" old drives that shut down when reaching a certain temp (because of old age i suppose). It basically goes like this: the more magnetic disks are in the drive (so the thicker and heavier it looks) and the more rpm it has it will produce more heat... It'll produce even more when for instance downloading with p2p clients that greatly stress the drives. Actually you can prevent that by tinkering with the app settings and allocate as much RAM as possible for read/write caching or whatever it's called in the config. My personal opinion is that heat does damage any mechanical component over time in that obviously the more heat is produced the more the components dilate and hence the faster they wear out: the bearings and axis of the motor, the drive heads may become missaligned or may press on the disk a little too hard causing tiny scratches (the infamous bad sectors).

You can get fairly cheap 5.25" bay coolers frames for hard drives with small fans. You do need airflow there as it is near the top of the case. I had to do it once. The small fan can be quite loud so I ran them at 5v instead of 12v and got adequate cooling.

Search newegg.