External Firewire/USB Enclosures -insufficient cooling? Maxtor 160gig dead.

[druid3]

I'm interested in hearing from people who have external hard
drive enclosures. Are you having any heat related problems
such as drives getting corrupt after prolonged usage or outright
dying? Anyone out there having no problems?

My enclosure is an ADS dual link (firewire/USB) in which I
installed a Maxtor 160 gig. The enclosure has a tiny fan located
near the power supply.

Peering into the guts of the enclosure, I can see an electronic
component from the power supply circuit board is placed squarely
in front of the fan, thus obstructing some of the flow from the
hard drive. I think this component is a bridge rectifier, but
it's hard to see since there's a steel cage all around the power
supply. Is the fan perhaps only good enough to cool the enclosure's
power supply but doing very little for the hard drive itself?

My maxtor drive worked fine until i placed it in the enclosure.
Afterwards, it started corrupting data and eventually it developed
a horrible mechanical rattle that would go away only if I turned
off the drive for an hour to cool. Of course, once I heard the
rattle I knew the drive could no longer be trusted, but I wanted
to see if the issue was heat related.

I suspect the enclosure is to blame -it's very cramped and you can
feel how warm it gets in operation. When you take off the external
plastic shell and feel the metal shell underneath, you realize just
how hot the enclosure gets. I at first thought the fan had died,
but it hadn't. Also, and I believe this is critical, there is very
little space between the bottom of the drive and where it mounts into
the enclosure. At least when the drive was mounted internally in
my computer case I was able to leave a lot of space between drive bays.
This area must heat up horribly in the drive enclosure, and it's right
where the drive electronics and motor spindle are located. I figure
the data corruption probably occurred from the drive electronics
getting hot.

Perhaps maxtor drives run too hot to put in these enclosures without
more cooling? Should I switch to western digital? It's hard to tell
for me with only this one drive failing, which is why I'd like to
hear from others out there.

 

[Cathy De Viney]

I recently bought a Coolmax CD-510B Combo enclosure (black, aluminum,
USB/Firewire) from www.newegg.com and a Western Digital 160GB HD from Office
Max (HD=$80 after rebates).

I read some comments from users in the comments section on Newegg and it
seems that aluminum enclosures with a fan are best to use with hard drives,
due to the heating problem. There are plastic and aluminum enclosures, and
they range from 2.5" to 3.5" to 5.25", some with and some without fans.

It seemed that the general feeling was aluminum with a fan (for hard drives)
was the way to go to prevent early HD demise.

 

[asd]

yes. many, if not most, of the cheapo enclosures are very poorly designed...
especially those little gray plastic ones.. horrible. The ADS units, while
larger, do have poor ventilation even with the fan. But I have not had a
drive die in one of them yet.

 

[Will Dormann]

I'm interested in hearing from people who have external hard
drive enclosures. Are you having any heat related problems
such as drives getting corrupt after prolonged usage or outright
dying? Anyone out there having no problems?

I have a Coolmax CD309 combo enclosure, and I think it's pretty poorly
designed. The case body is aluminum, but the mounting tray is plastic.
Because of this, there is absolutely no conduction to take heat away
from the drive.

I ended up squeezing in the sides of the case so that it's at least
touching the top of the drive.

I still wouldn't trust it for continuous use, though. I juse use it
for backups. (No longer than 20 mins at a time)



-WD

 

[Joe Hayes]

No way heat caused your drive to die. If you look at the external OneTouch
USB drives that Maxtor sells themselves, none of them have fans, and they
use DM9 7200rpm drives. Sure it's an oven inside, but they warranty the
drives for 3 years, so it must be OK.

 

[Richard Crowley]

"Joe Hayes" wrote ...

No way heat caused your drive to die. If you look at the
external OneTouch USB drives that Maxtor sells themselves,
none of them have fans, and they use DM9 7200rpm drives.
Sure it's an oven inside, but they warranty the drives for 3
years, so it must be OK.

LOL! )

 

[Rod Speed]

No way heat caused your drive to die.
Wrong.

If you look at the external OneTouch USB drives that
Maxtor sells themselves, none of them have fans, and
they use DM9 7200rpm drives. Sure it's an oven inside,

Just another example of lousy design.

but they warranty the drives for 3 years, so it must be OK.

Pathetic, really.

 

[Rod Speed]

Just another example of lousy design.

Like hell they do.
http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/service/warranty/faq.htm
The worst is actually 90 days.

 

[druid3]

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/service/warranty/faq.htm
The worst is actually 90 days.

I also noticed this crappy warranty support from maxtor
when I checked out their website a couple of days ago. The
90-day warranty on the 3000LS isn't surprising considering
the number of problems I've seen posted in forums about these.

It's a pity the ADS enclosure gets so hot because the firewire
interface was working wonderfully. I was able to capture direct
from digital video camcorder to the external drive with zero
dropped frames. It looks like I'm going to have to rip the
electronics out of the ADS and build a custom fan-cooled enclosure.

 

[TheMartian]

I'm interested in hearing from people who have external hard
drive enclosures. Are you having any heat related problems
such as drives getting corrupt after prolonged usage or outright
dying? Anyone out there having no problems?

My enclosure is an ADS dual link (firewire/USB) in which I
installed a Maxtor 160 gig. The enclosure has a tiny fan located
near the power supply.

Peering into the guts of the enclosure, I can see an electronic
component from the power supply circuit board is placed squarely
in front of the fan, thus obstructing some of the flow from the
hard drive. I think this component is a bridge rectifier, but
it's hard to see since there's a steel cage all around the power
supply. Is the fan perhaps only good enough to cool the enclosure's
power supply but doing very little for the hard drive itself?

My maxtor drive worked fine until i placed it in the enclosure.
Afterwards, it started corrupting data and eventually it developed
a horrible mechanical rattle that would go away only if I turned
off the drive for an hour to cool. Of course, once I heard the
rattle I knew the drive could no longer be trusted, but I wanted
to see if the issue was heat related.

I suspect the enclosure is to blame -it's very cramped and you can
feel how warm it gets in operation. When you take off the external
plastic shell and feel the metal shell underneath, you realize just
how hot the enclosure gets. I at first thought the fan had died,
but it hadn't. Also, and I believe this is critical, there is very
little space between the bottom of the drive and where it mounts into
the enclosure. At least when the drive was mounted internally in
my computer case I was able to leave a lot of space between drive bays.
This area must heat up horribly in the drive enclosure, and it's right
where the drive electronics and motor spindle are located. I figure
the data corruption probably occurred from the drive electronics
getting hot.

Perhaps maxtor drives run too hot to put in these enclosures without
more cooling? Should I switch to western digital? It's hard to tell
for me with only this one drive failing, which is why I'd like to
hear from others out there.

very possible, I have seen problems with some of the cheaper enclosures,
and not only heat related, but also the PSU some of them use are tiny,
and not really upto running larger hard drives

a client of mine lost 3 x 250GB WD drives this way, before giving up and
buying LaCie drives

I have 8 of those LaCie 250GB Firewire D2 drives, all have performed
without any problems, only getting a little warm to the touch, and thats
after weeks of 24 x 7 operation

 

[Rod Speed]

I also noticed this crappy warranty support from maxtor
when I checked out their website a couple of days ago.

Yeah, as far as I know they have never had 3
year warrantys on any of their external drives.

The 90-day warranty on the 3000LS isn't surprising considering
the number of problems I've seen posted in forums about these.

Yeah, hell of an inditement of Maxtor's design capabilitys.

It's a pity the ADS enclosure gets so hot because
the firewire interface was working wonderfully.

Yeah, absolutely classic example of the
downsides with the bleeding edge of technology.

I was able to capture direct from digital video camcorder
to the external drive with zero dropped frames. It looks
like I'm going to have to rip the electronics out of the
ADS and build a custom fan-cooled enclosure.

Yeah, or go for one that has been designed properly
and if that isnt possible, maybe just put the ADS guts
into one that has a decent thermal design.

 

[Charles Tomaras]

I also noticed this crappy warranty support from maxtor
when I checked out their website a couple of days ago. The
90-day warranty on the 3000LS isn't surprising considering
the number of problems I've seen posted in forums about these.

It's a pity the ADS enclosure gets so hot because the firewire
interface was working wonderfully. I was able to capture direct
from digital video camcorder to the external drive with zero
dropped frames. It looks like I'm going to have to rip the
electronics out of the ADS and build a custom fan-cooled enclosure.

I've got an ADS enclosure running a Maxtor 7200 RPM drive that has been on
for weeks now. I turned it off and opened it up and the drive was cooler to
the touch than the fixed drives in my PC case.

 

[mikep76]

If your are using one of the ADS drive/CD-ROM cases, which can fit
either a 3-1/2 inch hard drive or a 5-1/2 CD-ROM drive, you can remove
the front plate and use a 2 or 3 fan, 5-1/2 inch cradle for a 3-1/2
inch hard drive. These fans sit just inside the front of the ADS box,
and can pump plenty of air across the drive, while the single fan at
the rear of the enclosure can exhaust the air out the rear. I have 3
of these enclosures and have been using them for hours at a time day
after day without any drive failures (almost all of my drives are
Maxtor, with a few Western Digital).

I am running 4 120GB drives in my new dual Xeon box with no trouble,
but as soon as I received it, I removed the side panels and installed
several additional fans. Similarly, I still have a Pentium Pro and a
dual Pentium Pro, plus an old Gateway 486/33 upgraded to an AMD and 2
old VAIO's, and the only drive I have ever lost was the original and
brand new vAIO 522DS system drive, which smoked during a power surge.
Maxtor replaced this 10 gig drive with a 27 gig, because they didn't
even sell the 10 gig drives anymore. At that time, I believe Maxtor
routinely had 3 year warranties, IIRC.

The main point is, that I may lose my hearing due to all the fan noise
when I am running 2 or 3 computers at the same time, but I doubt I
will have premature drive failure due to excess heat.

 

[Wayne Youngman]

I have 8 of those LaCie 250GB Firewire D2 drives, all have performed
without any problems, only getting a little warm to the touch, and thats
after weeks of 24 x 7 operation

Hi,
sorry to ask, as I don't really know you, but any chance you could loan me
$500-00? lol! small change to you right?

 

[David Chien]

In my experience:

ME-320 series enclosures for 3.5"/5.25" at www.newegg.com and elsewhere
fit any 3.5" HD just fine, keep them cool with lots of air space above
and around the HD, and have a rear fan that keeps air moving through the
case.

ME-720 series 3.5" enclosures should be =avoided= at all costs!
Although they have a tiny bottom fan in the case, the airflow is simply
inadaquate and a WD 120BB inside it for a half hour+ easily topped 50
degrees C and was seriously too hot to hold for even a few seconds.
Basically, a HD killer and ..... a few months later, it died even though
I pulled the HD that day and dropped it into a lower-temperature PC case
environment. =( =(

---

Thus, small, tight-fitting plastic 3.5" HD cases should be avoided at
all costs unless they've got serious fan moving air through them (none
that I've found and I've looked around a lot).

The only ones that may be worth investigating are the solid
metal/aluminum cases that have been selling here and there such as the
ByteCC ME-350 series. Figure if Maxtor is putting their HDs into
similar metal cases for their OneTouch external HD series w/o any fans
at all, the metal casing acting as a huge heatsink allows for sufficient
cooling? (nobody's tested and =measured= the HD temp inside after a few
dozen minutes of formatting & full usage)

Otherwise, a sure-thing are the ME-320 5.25" enclosures that certainly
won't ever get the HD hot enough to even be a problem.

While these makers often say they're enclosures will work fine, most
never bother testing a hot HD inside for days on end to see if they'll
fry....

 

[David Chien]

No way heat caused your drive to die. If you look at the external OneTouch
USB drives that Maxtor sells themselves, none of them have fans, and they
use DM9 7200rpm drives. Sure it's an oven inside, but they warranty the
drives for 3 years, so it must be OK.

Got one here and they certainly don't get =that= hot even after
running them for hours. The casing keeps the entire thing cool enough
so you won't worry much vs. plastic cases on the others which insulate
and kill HDs with encased heat. The most these Maxtor Onetouch's ever
get is just warm, never hot.