Tell me some of the dangers with using a cooling pad

Yeah, as long as the USB connections are properly made, the only downside of using a notebook cooler is that you will use your notebook longer, the battery will/should last longer and you will have less chance of the CPU, GPU and the HDD overheating and throttling (or even shutting down) the computer.

Oh! No downsides at all.

If you keep the cooler on your desk, then you can also have an external 2.5" HDD inside too with the Zalman ZM-NC2500Plus version.

Myself, I have the ZM-NC2000, but I will be trying the Zalman NC3000U with a 220 mm fan soon too.

 

Unfortunately, this is not the case There might not even be any overcurrent protection at all. No biggie with a 10 USD external hub, but a 500+ USD laptop is something different

Indeed, the running-hot laptop will then fail after the warranty has expired...



Michael

 

Michael,

The use of a cooling pad does not guarantee that a notebook will not fail - in warranty or out.

What it does offer though is the maximum performance it is capable of (no throttling), better ergonomics (no sweaty palms on the heated keyboard) and a chance of a long(er) and useful life.

Even the best made notebooks will benefit from one or two of the above with a good cooler. The only downside is the price (some think that $70 is too much to spend on $500 system - but they don't realize that, like an external monitor, this can be used with your next system too.

Dependibility is high on my priorities for a system - a mere $70 'investment' has proven itself to be far more effective in getting a significantly more dependable system than even a product replacement warranty (if you can get one for the same low price) usually is.

And for the USB 'protection' - it should be on the notebook itself - not the hub or device which you're plugging into.

 

You don't have to spend a good amount, even 25-30 would do fine. Just raising the notebook an cm or an inch off the ground ensures your cooling system gets to intake cooler air. If it even prolongs it for 10-14 months, that would be fine by me but if you have an uber gaming laptop you should be getting a cooling pad anyway.

 

Wrong, wrong, 100% wrong. Incorrect.

Hard drives of old (like 25+ years ago) could suffer from directional instability, especially the high capacity ones of the day, you would whave to orient them in one direction and leave them there. And the issues weren't due to gravity either. But not todays drives, and certainly not laptop drives. Hard drives are in everything from (older) iPods, cars, every sort of portable computer available. Gravity has no bearing on the operation of the drive. The platters are rigid and perfectly balanced, the motor is powerful enough, rotation is plenty fast enough, the force of gravity is insignificant. Heck your hard drive would even work in weighless space.

 

Classic Ipods (HDD based) are known to have hard drive failures FYI. We have received plenty of them with bad hard drives, and many tech reviewers warned against it.
Perfectly balanced/rigid in terms of no play, but fragile. You forgot that part.
Car hard drives spin under 5400rpm if I recall correctly. In between 4000-5000 RPM, I am unsure if they go lower then that but I would not be surprised.

Yup every portable computer, where most hard drives run at 5400 rpm and of course are bought at the lowest price possible (hence why sometimes you will see different brand memory/hard drives used in the same model of laptop).
Quality is not always assured.

You are talking like every hard drive is some enterprise server hard drive with quality being top notch.

Actually gravity does have an effect on the operation of a hard drive. Specially when it falls. -fail joke-
Edit: On a serious note, hard drives are affected by gravity, but since gravity is a constant (I know it varies but it varies so slightly it doesn't matter) so it can be accounted for when the hard drive is designed and manufactured.

I am not going to argue this anymore. Chances are a overheating laptop will die far quicker then a hard drive at 45 degrees.

 

Gravity has no effect. Run it at any angle you want. End of story.

If I have to crack open my 20 year old physics book to prove it to you, I'll hit you over the head with it.

NEXT!

 

Hi,

Sorry, I forgot the "irony" tags

You are correct - it should be. But most, if not all, laptops do not limit the current to 500 mA. And apart from the manufacturer, nobody knows if there is any protection at all

Overcurrent protection in an external hub would be nice, too. And as for the devices: USB specs exist. Any device demanding more than 500 mA does not meet the specs (unless power is fed externally). No external bus powered 2.5" HDD and no external bus powered optical drive is specs compliant.

Michael

 

I don't know about that. Many don't even provide the requisite 500mA.

 

This is true. My Gateway M6862's USB port was already failing to provide enough power using my Coolermaster infinity which operates at around 5v@600mA.
I noticed a gradual reduction in air flow with the cooler as time went by.
Eventually it seriously cut the air flow, when the cooler was used on a different laptop it worked properly but when it was connected to the M6862 it went much slower.

 

Ulimate evidence: Seagate's own tilted FreeAgent dock. It's not an embedded device or HTPC case, so the tilt is not a space constraint - it's a conscious choice of the HDD manufacturer.

Either the sceptics are full of it, or Seagate has really bad engineers. Make of it what you will.

 

I am of the opinion that a HDD runs best either horizontal or vertical - any other angle is a no-no (45 degrees being the most extreme).

There is no bearing in use today in HDD's that can fully support the disk platters the same way at an angle as it can when H or V.

I vote that Seagate has really bad engineers.

(Maybe they're fired already?).

 

i agree with tilleroftheearth , a HDD has moving parts, putting it on an angle would put it in a unnatural position. that dock makes me sick

 

I vote their QC is far worse! Probably some poor bloke on the assembly line with a giant mallet.

 

They're not bad, they just don't work in a vacuum and, therefore, don't always have the final decision on what gets produced and what gets overlooked. Keep in mind that there are always compromises in what's best structurally and what will sell to the public at a profitable rate. The amount of quality depends on where that line is drawn.

For example:

Maybe, but have you ever noticed the rear wheels on a [tractor] trailer when it turns the corner? Wouldn't it be more efficient if the wheels could turn with the vehicle?

 

Ok, if you decided to do a test to see which hard drives died first then overall the ones that were either flat or horizontal would probably be marginally less likely to break. By marginally I mean so marginally that it's not worth worrying about.

 

You do realise that gravity compared to the rotational force on the disk would be a tiny, TINY percentage of the forces going onto the disk?

Ever had a soft bladed usb fan for your computer? They become rigid when spun.

Same goes for for strimmers used in gardening, they have a plastic blade that seems flimsy but when spinning will cut through grass (And fingers!).

So gravity will have a negliable impact anyway considering how fast these drives are spinning. The only impact comes when tilting them while in use.

 

I'm of the opinion that walking under a ladder causes bad luck.

Just because it "feels" wrong doesn't make it wrong. That's why we have science. Because our perceptions and our feelings deceive us.

Physics says that a drive will work fine at any angle, because the force of gravity is vanishingly small compared to the other forces at work. HOWEVER, CHANGING the angle of a drive while it is spinning exposes it to gyroscopic forces which IS a strain on things. But drives (especially notebook drives) are designed around this by having reinforced spindles and arms so they don't move in response to those forces.

There are a LOT of people that have notebooks. Most of them don't think twice about the angles they use it at, or moving them while using them for that matter. If the angle of the drive had any bearing on it's operation there would be a lot more drive failures than there are.

 

Not to mention huge warnings on the laptops/in the user manuals about using the system at an angle.

 

I've seen cooler that draws fan from the laptop's bottom towards the desk, these are obviously poor design as the cooler compete with the laptop for cool air. Sometimes this can be a simple fix by manually flipping the fan installation. Other times it could just be worst than having your laptop without such cooler.

 

sameapple,

that is not a poor design - it still pulls cool air under the notebook.

The cooler doesn't 'compete' for cool air with the notebook - they each take what they need.

As for the drive angle 'issue': I didn't say that there would be an immediate failure if used other than H or V.

What I mentioned is that we do not get the privilege of buying a bearing that can run the platters as true and as stable at an optimum angle (0 or 90 degrees) as when they're run on an angle. At least not for sub $100 anyways.

You can argue this all you want - but it won't change the fact that these things are built to a price point, after all.

 

There's literally no difference on any angle... to say there is would be to say that an object in a different position will be affected by gravity in a different way, which is just not the case. The net potential energy of the disk change is 0, anytime one part of the disk moves another part moves the opposite way, therefor (because the disk is a circle) it is literally impossible for the disk to be affected by any type of tilt.

edit: though as I've said before (ironically) acceleration in a direction can affect your hard drive.

 

And again; not the disk - the bearing.

 

I don't use a cooling pad, but what I did do was to stick four 3/4" thick rubber "feet" to the bottom of my laptop, raising it off the ground so that the fan actually gets air to work with. This lowered temps by about 10 degrees when running Furmark/Prime95 at the same time, and means I don't have to take a separate cooling pad or anything like that with me when I go somewhere with it.

That being said, if there's any cooling device I'm going to complain about, it's the heatsink/fan that Intel ships with its quad-core desktop CPUs. Those things will let the chip get up to 90 degrees and even higher under load, and that's with all the airflow in the world to work with. As a fun experiment, someone who doesn't care about their electric bill should run Prime95 on one of those nonstop and see how long it takes before the CPU burns itself out and starts outputting errors.

 

This thread is becoming comical to say the least. Why do you think drives can be used in portable devices such as camcorders, ipods and other portable devices where releative position is almost imposible to pretermine other than maybe as a prodiminant position?

drive "Tilt" does not matter. the bearings/heads and other mechanicals are designed to function irrelevant. Agreed though in the early days of HDD's this did matter, but those days are long over (Thank God).................

 

Can this be considered viral post of misinformation for the year? It used to be that size mattered, now angle...

 

Look at this pdf file, specifically under the 'Mount the Drive' section.

Angle, is important to Hitachi:

See:
http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/4DD4DCCA11DE5EB186256D6A0061C8A8/$file/Installposter.pdf

 

While there may be valid reasons that the angle does matter, for most modern notebook drives, won't they have been designed to withstand any angle the end users may end up putting their notebook at ?

Even for desktop, would anyone measure if their machine is at absolute horizontal or vertical position ?

 

Like I said, it used to be important! Notice Deskstar 3.5 and much older ATA/IDE drives. This does not pertain to our laptop drives etc................

Edit; Also that PDF does not refer to an angled slot, if one existed. They do not say anything about a mount in an angeled slot, they say do not mount it tilted. To me this means mount it straight in its slot not tilted and or cockeyed to say fit the 3.5 inside some free 2.5 bays etc. Every desktop case I've seen mounts the drive on a horizontal or vertical axis by a modular design, this is why they say can be mounted in any side vertical/horizontal slot etc. This is also why with the manual they do not specify the CASE has to run/mounted in a level plane as well for the drive to function...............

 

Considering how many times I've seen "battery maintenance tips" from the Nickel-something era slapped onto Lithium-something batteries, I'll take the dos and especially don'ts in any user guide with a large grain of salt, especially for products which have been through several generations of technological progress.

 

Wow useful information.

SIX TO SEVEN YEARS AGO.

Sheesh, nice pata pictures.

Guess I better be careful not to crush my AthlonXP core when I install my heatsink, I'll fine tune my AGP apature size and hopefully get some BH-5 or BH-6 memory.

 

May I respectfully ask what has changed in six or seven years in bearing design?

The laws of physics/science and achievable tolerances stays pretty much constant (at least in my view of the world).

Thanks for any real (new) information.

(Simply because information is old, does not mean it is not applicable today).

 

It is not just bearing design. Materials used both in the bearings heads and platters etc. effect MANY other factors along even with design changes. I can't help that these have happened but they have and for our benefit overall.

But even with all the changes today no one will recomend you install with the drive tilted but properly within its respective enclosure. You should not place improper torque on the case mounting it improperly (ie tilted).

And keep believing in OLD information, a great way to be wrong in a very short period of time. Our tech can change in almost a daily fashion it seems at times and there is always something new around the corner...............