Building a Heat Sink for Your Hard Drive

Once I had it plugged in, I backed up all my music on to it. Set it up as a scratch disk for a few heavy-duty applications and finally started up Time Machine and pointed it to the vast, open expanses of the drive. The drive with its 7200rpm motor and 480 Mbits/s transfer rate was chugging away effortlessly. Or so it seemed.

By end of day, I found that it was running fairly warm. You couldn't fry an egg on it, but neither could you put your ear to it. Not for too long anyway. I needed to find a way to keep this fanless awesomeness cool.

The next day, I went back to the Radio Market and after making a few enquiries found a wholesale dealer of heatsinks and all things related. They didn't have any wide enough to cover the whole drive so instead I bought two of the widest aluminum pieces they had in stock. Not forgetting to pick up some thermal paste as well.

Now I had to find a way to make these pieces stick to the drive. Would I have to make do with some industrial-strength rubber bands? Somewhere around this time I stopped for a crisp bowl of freshly-diced watermelon.

Then, as I made my way down the crowded street I came across a machine tools workshop. I had passed this way many times before but this was the first time I'd seen it. I It seemed slightly out of place - flanked as it was by delicate electronic goods outlets - but I was glad it was there! With a few holes drilled into the plates I now had a better idea of what to do and picked up a bunch of nuts and bolts on my way back.

I played around with the pieces, trying to find the best possible way to put them together. Ideally, I had to cover as much surface area as I could. Once that was sorted out, I set about applying the thermal paste on the contact areas. This I knew was critical, since  heatsinks and their corresponding contact surfaces, no matter how good the clamping mechanism, tend to have gaps or air pockets - and since air is a bad conductor of heat, the thermal paste is used to ensure total and efficient contact.

With that done, I washed and dried my hands, sandwiched the drive between the two pieces, ran the bolts through, tightened the nuts till they were nice and snug and voila!

I had to angle the pieces to leave the ventilation slots open.

And since the heatsinks are relatively heavier it turned out to be pretty stable when set upright. For additional support, I made sure the edge was flush with the base.

Now that this thing was ready, I was worried if - to cool the heatsinks - I would now have to deal with computer fans; they are noisy and need their own 12V power source. And more wires. But then realized - much to my relief - that the fins, since they are vertical, were getting cooled well enough by the fan overhead!