Slowing down HardDrives

Hi, a friend is 'building' a tv recorder with a HardDisc.

He is concerned about overheating; apparently the 'box' is quite small.

He has bought a Seagate drive with 5,400 rpm and has heard that if you slow the drive down it will cause less heat?

He has found a utility from Seagate that should slow the HardDrive down.
Question is if he slows it down on his computer and then sticks the drive into his tv recorder box will it stay slowed down? I suspect not.

I told him HardDrives don't make much heat but .....

Any help appreciated
Jim

HDs certainly can get pretty hot. That's why you can buy coolers for them. ;)

Um... when you say 'tv recorder', do you mean a modified HD recorder? Or a PC box with a video capture device attached?

Never heard of slowing down a hard drive but I'd imagine (if not put money on it) that its done via software. That said, it won't make much difference to the heat. Hard drives manufacturers know their devices generate heat and they're designed to operate as such.

Worrying over nothing, I think.

Mmm, I wouldn't risk poking around with this.

Hard drives don't need fans as such.

Example - I recently bought a Western Digital My Book external HD. It doesn't have any fans or cooling. WD designed it with ventilation holes - but it is a normal HD inside the plastic housing.

So, based on WD's expertise, I would just say to him to make sure there is ventilation - Ie, heat can escape from within this unit he is putting the HD in.

Don't bother slowing the HD down.

You never want to use harddrive fan/cooler..
They are in fact bad for the harddrive.

Only if your fans are sucking in dusty air. And even then its fine if you clean out your PC case every now and again.

If your system is properly filtered, no problem.

I don't think that's why..
I think it's because the temperature is flux'ing so much..

(I've never experienced this personally, but heard from a tech guy)

Hmm, I don't see how a fan would cause the temp to fluctuate.

According to Google's hard drive study, hard drives are more likely to fail from being too cool than too hot. Count-intuitive, perhaps, but there you are.

Buying a less rubbish drive will cause less heat. In either case, a 5400 rpm drive is is bordering on being too slow to be able to record SDTV at a decent resolution / framerate / compression anyway so slowing it down further seems somewhat counter productive. They're also too noisy.

tell him to wait a year or so, solid state harddisks are on their way. We already have 'hybrid' disks beginning to emerge that can 'apparently' load vista or xp in seconds (prob. hype).

Thanks guys, i'll pass on your advice.
Jim

Yes, for the <20GB 'usable in a laptop' kind of way, not in the 'hundreds of gigabytes' category that you'd want/need to be useful in a DVR.

Don't hold your breath for solid state drives for mass-storage purposes just yet.

there's already solid state high volume solutions... they just cost a small fortune.

A temperature range between 30 and 40 degrees C seems to be the 'sweet spot'. Taking other things learned from the Google study, if a drive is going to fail it will more likely either fail in the first year, or after the 4th.

If I were to purchase a new HD now, it would be a Western Digital SE16 500GB. Anecdotal evidence suggests they are quiter (or at least, less intrusivly noisy) than Samsung SpinPoint drives. They also run very cool. Cooler than some 5400RPM drives.

If I were building a machine to go in my TV cabinet, I would use a WD drive (and AMD energy efficient CPU, underclocked and passivly cooled).