Are you for Hard Drive Stacking or Against?

[dman777]

I have two 350 Seagate Hard drives in my case and I'm about to order one more for my extensive DVD collection . Right now I have my two hard drives in the usual hard drive bay area in the front of the case on the bottom. The hard drives are one empty hard drive space apart with a fan blowing on them. If I add the new hard drive it will have to be right next to one of the other hard drives. I'm not sure if I want to do that because they are like heat rocks and even with a fan there isn't much room for the air to pass between them. I'm thinking about putting the third one up in one of the empty CD ROM bays on the upper part of the case. Would that be best or is stacking them not that bad and it's only in my head?

[Shinma]

If fan is blowing over the HDDs,
Should not be an issue.

You can monitor HDD temps with software such as Lavalys Everest.

[kaulbach]

Seagate uses the same basic design for all their drives so the IDE and SATA models are slightly overbuilt since they also use this design for the higher end SCSI models which can run like ovens for days on end. I wouldn't worry much about it.

[dman777]

yeah, i used to have western digitals and i stacked them and half of them died within 3 years(even w. a fan). but then again they were western digitals...

[DanceMan]

I would worry, and I'd put it up top. Your main concern about the location above is that heat rises and it may end up in a dead air zone as far as airflow.

One of my garage sales buys a couple of years ago was an older tower from the era when the hard drives were mounted under the floppy drives. This one had an internal Jaz drive added between the hdd and fdd so that all three were stacked tight together. Guess what? The hard drive was dead.