PCA Forums

I just got a X15-36lp SCSI drive and have been reading a lot that they require tons of cooling. My full tower case has a nice little HDD rack at the top right in front of a couple of fan vents. That is where the X15 will be mounted. Basically, I have 2x 80mm fans (with air filters) blowing in from the rear of the case then a 92mm fan blowing out at the top of the case (a few cm's above it). It looks something like this:


8.............................92MM Out
0.................................../\
M...................................|
M...................................|
-------> HDD Rack ----->|
F....................................|
A....................................|
N....................................|
S....................................|

For now the X15 will be the only drive in the rack, but I may add a 10k drive in there two if I find myself strapped fro storage space. Thoughts?

Should be sufficent.
I got a Cheetah X15, a Cheetah 9LP and an old IBM SCSI drive sandwitched in the drivecage in my Lian-Li PC60, cooled with 2x 80mm fans and I have no heat problems. Just try to keep some space between the HDDs so the air can move between them and cool them.

Thanks for the reply. How is your 9LP, Doc? That's the drive I am thinking about picking up. You can get a 9gig drive for only about $70 now. That would be nice for games, etc.

Uhm, yer better of with a newer IDE drive, you won't see the SCSI performance some would expect, it's an old drive and it maxes out at under 20MB/s max transfer rate.

Drives like the WD1000BB has almost the same low random access time as the 9LP ( 1ms slower) and easily double the transfer rate ... and the 9LP is a HOT drive.

I got my 9LP like 3.5 years ago, back then it was pretty much the fastest drive on the planet ... but that was almost 4 years ago.

I suggest that you keep yer X15-36LP with a small partition for OS (3-4GB) and the rest in a second partition for your favourite games. Get a second huge new IDE drive for apps and storage, the WD1000JB or the WD1200JB, they're a lil more expensive for IDE drives but they have a HUGE cache (8MB) rivaling today's top SCSI drives when it comes to single-user desktop performance, at least the 10K SCSI drives.
Or get the cheaper WD1200BB or the IBM Deskstar 120GXP

Check the reviews at http://www.storagereview.com/ ... that's what I'll most likely get with my next system.