On Aug 29, 2010, at 3:04 PM, Cliff Rediger wrote:
Once, one my enclosure fans seemed to be over-running and someone suggested that I may have the sensor taped in the wrong place. Correct place, they said, is in the center of the HD, and that seemed to help. So, maybe it's the Enclosure Temp Sensor of which I speak.
Exactly which type of external enclosure are we talking about here? I've had a lot of experience with small external enclosures that hold one or two HDs, and I've never seen one with a variable fan whose speed is controlled via a temperature sensor. It's possible such an enclosure exists, but I've never seen one. I have seen fans in various enclosures that run fast ALL THE TIME, and I've also seen fans that make too much noise. I've replaced noisy fans with quieter ones, and I've removed fans completely from enclosures with adequate passive ventilation for sufficient cooling. Most modern HDs won't produce enough heat to be a problem unless they're in some sort of near failure mode, and by then they're so far gone that a fan probably won't help too much in my opinion.
If electrical tape will work, I'm good with that. Why use Kapton tape to begin with? I wonder.
The deal with Kapton tape is that it's super-thin and super- lightweight, and you get a lot of length for the price. It's used in the airline and aerospace industry a lot because of the weight savings, but it also has little resistance to abrasion and has been implicated in many frayed wiring problems. Obviously in an airplane or spacecraft where weight is critical Kapton tape is probably the best choice. In computers I think it's pure price per unit length, you need to think of it as heat-resistant packing tape, it's the thinest, cheapest thing that works OK at higher temperatures. Since electrical tape also works at high temperatures it's OK as a replacement, but in an airplane or spacecraft the weight difference would be significant. There are thousands of miles of wiring and tape in an airplane, and each extra gram is a gram stolen from payload capacity. It costs more than the weight in gold to place any mass into outer space, so when you think about taking something into space, you need to think of it as "gold" in terms of cost per unit mass. Even at this cost, they use duct tape on the space station, which proves that duct tape is worth its weight in gold.
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