Handmade external cooling
12/08/08 20:41 Filed in: Hardware
In this week's BitDepth, I explore the challenges of keeping a backup system going and the recent drive failures that I've suffered through.
Two drive failures in less than eight months is something to be concerned about, and changing drive brands was part of the solution.
In the past, I've mentioned the poor results that I've had with drives from Western Digital, which populated many iMacs a few years ago and even a few laptops. In those days, I used to provide technology support services for a few Mac clients and the incidence of failed drives from that manufacturer was well above average.
I'd had good experiences with drives from IBM, so when they sold their business to Hitatchi, I went along. Those good experiences came to a close with my recent woes and I've since switched to Toshiba's mechanisms in the hope of seeing an improvement.
That said, I also have to acknowledge that I push drives well past their expected profile of use and the close tolerances of larger drive capacities shoved into tiny cases inevitably create difficult working environments for what is essentially a magnetic "needle" skittering back and forth a hair's breadth above a polished metal "platter."
In an effort to reduce what appears to be a new trend of inadvertent DJ scratching of these delicate mechanisms, particularly during heavy Lightroom and Photoshop use, I've added some external cooling to my laptop.
At first, I looked around for a really small desktop fan, something around eight inches in diameter that I could wedge under the shelf behind my laptop. I couldn't find any of those, and began seriously looking at exhaust fans, but they were really expensive.
I finally settled on internal computer fans (well, doh) ganged in a pair on a card behind my system.
The ratchafee rig has worked well so far, and wicks hot air away from my laptop system silently and briskly.
I got the pair of fans from Circuit Zone, a local computer supplier, who helpfully gave me all the wiring and voltage information I needed to put the system together on a phone call.
I bought two 80mm fans, clipped the excess cabling and wired them through a toggle switch to a 5v mains adapter. Five volt adapters aren't easy to find, but some cell phones use them and the power supplies from old Zip drives are also rated correctly (who thought those would ever be useful again?).
I glued the two fans to a stiff black card with a shim under the back of the card to angle everything down to the rear of my Macbook and let it dry.
The rig is completely silent and small enough that I can't see it, tucked behind my laptop's screen while I'm working.
While editing images I sometimes feel a rush of warm air gusting away under my arm as I work and smile.
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