This page was imported from my old site and is yet to be reviewed.
I have a pair of Western Digital WD4000KS SATA drives in my n2100, in use as a mirrored pair. Western Digital's environmental specifications for this drive model state that the maximum operating temperature should be 55 degrees celcius. Unfortunately I have found that these drives in the thecus n2100 regularly get hotter than this.
I use a bunch of shellscripts, @smartctl@ and @rrdtool@ to monitor the disk temperatures. Check out the scripts in "this tarball":./temperature.tar.gz.
Here are the approaches I've tried for cooling the thing down, in ascending order of success.
h3. By default
Leaving both drives in, with the plastic n2100 lid on, in a cupboard with a closed door, virtually guarantees disk temperatures up to 60 degrees celcius.
If you can put up with the noise, leaving the cupboard door open helps.
h3. Lid off
Taking off the lid makes the in-built fan have little effect, but I find this does reduce temperatures below the red line in most circumstances. The drawback, of course, is having the thing sitting there open to the world.
h4. Lid off + USB fan
I have a little toy USB fan (branded "Dell") that I picked up from a LinuxWorld Expo in London a few years ago.
Plugging this into a USB port on the back and pointing it so that it blows air across the top of the drive enclosures results in the lowest temperatures I have achieved.
However, this is a toy fan, and it makes one hell of a racket. After a day or so of continuous use, the racket got worse, and I suspect the fan's bearings were wearing out.
h3. Biscuit Tin lid
!small_cimg4259.jpg!:med_cimg4259.jpg
I found a tin of chocolates in a local cheap shop. The lid for this tin is 8" square, which is the exact depth of the thecus box. The lid fits snugly in that dimension with an inch or so of give on the other dimension.
As the drive enclosure is taller than the outer plastic housing, the biscuit tin lid is resting on the top of it. This means there's about a centimetre of air clearance between the plastic housing and the tin on the sides.