Follow up to the ‘Rubber Bands’ in Show #70
June 14, 2006
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Posted by Mike
I received several emails and a harsh warning from my network engineers. DO NOT use rubber bands inside your computer. It did sound cool, but here are some comments:
From Chris – “Between the heat and the constant air movement, it’s a harsh environment and the rubber bands dry out quickly. You don’t want to be sitting there in six months and hear a ‘thunk’ when your running drive drops. It’s a good idea, but I think you have to look for a different material.
From Robert – “One guaranteed characteristic of standard old rubber bands is that they deteriorate quickly in warm/hot environments, loose their elasticity and fail. If a hard drive were to fall in it’s cage while spinning this would certainly cause significant damage, and I presume most of us don’t peek inside our cages to check our rubber bands very often. Also, I’m impressed that drives sometimes transfer considerable heat to the cage through the metal to metal contact of mounting screws, therefore, theoretically, causing the drive do dissipate heat and keeping it a bit healthier”
I passed along a bad idea from Maximum PC.
Categories: Blog Post
Mike what about trying some form of a rubber washer between the HD and the cage? if you really want to make sure that nothing is moving put a rubber washer on each side of the screw.
ir screw > rubber washer > mount > Ruber Washer > hard drive.
Does anyone have experience doing this?
I found a thread on anandtech about this issue –> link:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid;=1876058
The idea sugested at the bottom sounds interesting. Use some rubber tube with shoelaces in them.
I have a solution for the problems with the rubber bands drying out ant the lack of heat transfer to the case. I mount a dual fan drive sooler to the drive and then suspend it with four metal springs. THe drive cooler keeps air circulating over the drive and the metal springs don’t fail over time.