I just bought an external USB 2.0 enclosure for an IDE drive. I just opened the box and realized I didn't take cooling requirements into consideration. The enclosure (made by i/o magic) has no fan, no vents, nada. Its just a thin aluminum enclosure w/ an external power supply.

What is your experience w/ external cases? Do I need to be worried about heat dissipation? Is simply the conduction provided by the aluminum case enough?

I figure who better to ask about these things than developers right? We are demanding users, spend long hours at the machine and usually ;-) know our hardware.

Thanks in advance!

    I don't think that the drive would generate a lot of heat (the drives themselves are sealed to prevent any dust getting into the works), though I would have thought there'd be at least a minimal amount of holes for convection cooling, just to be on the safe side. But when I think of the PC's I've assembled in the past, the disk drives are usually stacked together in some part of the case that is not particularly well ventilated, so maybe it's not a big issue with them.

    So long story short: I don't really know, though my guess is it's probably not much of an issue.

      Your HD's shoudl be in the 30's Celcius for regular temperatures. I have a hot swap drive on my pc with a temp readout at a constant mid-high 30's
      Which is basically your body temperature so the enclousue should feel warm to the touch but not hot. If so try as nogdog said and punch some holes to let it vent otherwise you are looking at a cooling unit to do the job

        Pour some water on it occasionally to cool it down.

          I don't know about pouring water on it. I've poured a soda and a couple beers into a laptop, and its not too happy when that happens.

          I will knock some holes in it. I'm good at damaging stuff. I can probably do it with a pencil the dang case is so flimsy.

            Does it at least have radiator "fins" over a heatsink to allow the ambient air to carry off some heat? I have considered buying cheapo external enclosures in the past but have decided against it for this very same reason. Heat certainly is a contributing factor to shorter life in hard drives. The higher the drive capacity, the hotter the drive may be (well, I'm sure it's more relative to the drive internals too.) Just tear off the sides or mount a cool case fan on each side 🙂 (solder anyone?)

              The primary sources of heat in a PC enclosure are the CPU and GPU as they throw away their left over bits; the hard drive much less so (heat is a threat to hard drives, given their working tolerances, but they don't generate that much themselves for exactly that reason).

              Frankly, not having an enclosure is probably sufficient: when it comes to thermal control, the enclosure's function is to channel fan-driven air over the heatsinks instead of having the fan just blowing the ambient atmosphere about.

                9 days later

                The case will get warm to the touch, but not hot. I suppose the thin aluminum allows enough heat to be conducted away. There are no fins on the case. And there is very little clearance space between the drive and case...its a really tight fit.

                I was kinda "stuck" because I needed something right away and it had to support plain ol' IDE interface so I bought this case at Staples for $20. Most the cases for sale are SATA interface.

                I'm gonna head over to my local "surplus" computer vendor tomorrow and see if he's got some big honking archaic case with a fan in it.

                  5 days later

                  thats how they are meant to work - the aluminum is tight to the drive and the entire case acts as a heat sink - I have one and also an iomega external - the aluminum case only gets a bit hotter - even after a long day its only 'very warm' never what I'd call hot

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