Due to an overheated drive, I have installed a cooling fan on WD MyBookWorld II (white light)

Legal statement:  I can not be held responsible for damage that may occur attempting this, this is my experience only

As I had a drive fail recently on my WD MyBookWorld II I decided it was time to do some cooling.  This unit was on the top of my bookshelf with no airflow constrictions by the way.

I have a small 2" 12v fan that I bought at Radio Shack some time back (they still have them).  I cut up a spare USB cable and found it had red, black, white, and green wires.  I connected the matching red and black wires on the fan and USB cable and tested them on a USB travel charger (Didn’t want to burn my MyBook).  This worked to spin the fan at a good speed.  I put the fan on the top center of my unit using some double sided tape so that it “pulls” the air out of the unit in the same direction as the natural convective heat flow.  I can’t hear the fan and I have verified it cooled the unit at idle by 11 degrees F.  Temperature is life in electronics.

Method used to determine temperatures:

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ssh using Putty to WD MyBookWorld (must have SSH enabled from the web interface)

user: root
PW: welc0me  (this is the default password)

For drive 1 use:

smartctl -d ata -A /dev/sda|grep Temperature|cut -c 5-28,88-

For drive 2 use:

smartctl -d ata -A /dev/sdb|grep Temperature|cut -c 5-28,88-

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These temperatures should be very close, i.e., within one degree.  They should never be above 55 C.

Hope this helps someone NOT overheat.

Mike

PS:  Please kudo’s me using the star to the left if you like this.

Thanks for sharing…

Are you able to send a picture of the drive?  I would like to see how it looks.

Here is a picture of the initial install.  I plan to reroute some wires and make it cleaner, but it works fine for now.  As you can see this is a tiny fan.  A larger fan would make even more difference I’m sure.

Mike

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I’m guessing that it spins all the time, right?  No way to make that USB port sleep when the drives spin down, huh.