DeskMini 110 + 2x 7200rpm drives

aforumuser wrote: Hello... I'm considering to buy a DeskMini 110 and want to populate the two 2.5 drive slots with two WD Black 1TB 7200rpm (WD10JPLX) drives. Looking at the pictures, the Deskmini does not seem to have cooling holes on the back side with the drives, so my concern is that they will get too hot when under load - that's not acceptable, obviously. Does anyone have practical experience with two high performance drives in the DeskMini? Unfortunately, SSDs still cost too much and SMR drives are too slow.... :-/ Thank you!

I have a DeskMini 110, but use two SSDs in it. The SSDs report their temperatures, and they are only a few degrees warmer than SSDs mounted in well ventilated desktop cases.

I have never seen anyone complain about high HDD temperatures in the forum with the DeskMini PCs.

The mounting of the drives in the DeskMini is under the mother board tray, which is a relatively thick piece of metal. I'm sure that some heat from HDDs that are thicker than SSDs would be transferred to the mother board tray.

I've heard of studies that found HDDs actually last longer when they operate at temperatures 10 - 20° C above ambient temperature, instead of being cooler.

2.5" HDDs are designed to work in laptop and tablet PCs that have less ventilation than the DeskMini PC does. The HDD manufactures know they will be used in temperature extremes that mobile PCs experience and are designed to work in higher temperature environments. The DeskMini PC case is a more stable and cooler environment than may be experienced by mobile PCs.

I run now 2 disks, each 500GB single platter, 5400rpm, so low power drives, in RAID 0.
Idle they run at about 35-37°C
Under load they reach up to 51°C, then their performance noticeably drops -> I guess the drives slow themselves to prevent overheating.

So as a result, nope, I dare not even try 7200rpm drives when the 5400rpm already get that hot.

As a customer feedback to ASRock, this is clearly in need for improvement for newer models. Better airflow to the drives and the mounting solution is also quite fiddly.
I would also wish 15mm drives (4-5 TB...) would fit in there, and if you put in smaller drives they simply have more room for proper airflow.



Edited by aforumuser - 15 Jul 2017 at 1:54am

There are two SATA drive connections that come with the DeskMini 110, I have no idea why that article said otherwise, if it did.

Again, all the laptop and tablet PCs that exist today have far less ventilation for 2.5" HDDs then the DeskMini 110 does. If HDDs are throttling in the DeskMini 110, then they are also throttling in laptops and tablets, to an even greater degree.

I'm not clear about your two 5400RPM HDDs in RAID 0, are they in a DeskMini 110 now?

If so, it is surprising that they would over heat, particularly in RAID 0. Since the data is being written to two drives in RAID 0, each drive is only writing half the data a single drive would write. Write speed varies depending upon the size of the file, and type of data being written. Of course since HDDs are quite slow to begin with compared to any SSD, they will take longer to write or read data and create more heat for a longer period of time. Actually, a 7200RPM HDD will take a short time to write data than a 5400 RPM model, since the disks are spinning faster.

If the usage of this PC causes constant writing and reading from the drives, and you use HDDs, I would suggest using higher quality HDDs that won't throttle their performance when they get somewhat warm.

Have you configure Link Power management to your drives, and set the Windows Power Plan to spin down the drives quickly, if heat is an issue?

PC size and cooling ability are two compromises that we are still stuck with somewhat today. The smaller the size of the PC, the less cooling ability it has. If you need high capacity storage, I would still use an SSD for the OS and programs, and store large files on an HDD. Heat is not an issue for SSDs, and in this configuration the HDD would be under less continuous stress.

dude, just get an m.2 NVME SSD (512G) off ebay for ~130 bucks, I just built mine with this and it's quite fast, you really need to get an SSD of some form otherwise it will lag like crazy I feel