Basic fan cooling

[arcade_builder]

I'm going to build a budget system (AMD quad-core, 512MB passive video card, single hard drive, etc.) using this coolermaster case:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6811119106

The case comes with (2) 120mm fans: one in the rear, the other in the side. Would it be better to move the one from the side to the front as an intake so it can blow across the hard drive?...or is it better off in the side where it can help cool the passive video card? This system won't be used for gaming or anything too intense. I just want it to be as efficient and quiet as possible with the given hardware.

[Heiwashin]

Studies by google around 09 iirc showed that temperature had little to no effect on the lifetime of hard drives. The video card will probably like a little air flow though.

[just brew it!]

As long as you've got more exhaust than intake, air will be drawn in through the front vent and across the hard drives, even if there's no fan there. With 2 exhaust (the rear one plus the PSU) and one intake, I think your hard drives should be fine regardless of where the intake fan is installed.

As Heiwashin notes, since you are using a discrete video card, having the intake fan on the side may be preferable. Passively cooled video cards do tend to run a little warm...

Edit: It isn't clear from the pictures at Newegg whether a front fan is even supported... it looks like there may be mounting holes for it, but the front vent looks too small to properly accommodate a 120mm fan.

[Pegasus]

The holes for the front fan look like 80 or 92mm to me. I'd vote leave it as side.

[mikeymike]

I'm using the Coolermaster Elite 330, which has a grille for the entire front of the chassis. There's a single Coolermaster fan in the back running at about 900rpm most of the time pulling air through the front to the point that dust hangs on the front of the case. I think a bit of gentle airflow is ideal for hard disks. I don't think they benefit from more airflow than that. I think what's best for a hard disk is to have as little temperature variation as possible.

It was a while ago that I skimmed through Google's findings on disk temperatures, but I remember thinking that their tests weren't really in the scenario of a 9-to-5 desktop but more server related.

[Pegasus]

My PC is pretty minimal and I just have a case fan directly above the CPU heatsink shooting air up with low rpm (P180 mini). So air just casually comes in all vents on back, front etc. But if you have a hot heatsink on a passive GPU you wouldn't want air flow to be far from that hunk of metal.

I think you are right about a steady temp and HDDs.
"The figure shows that failures do not increase when the average temperature increases. In fact, there is a clear trend showing that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates. Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal of this trend." - google study
The drives that failed the least ran between 35-40c which was the middle range in their study (15c lowest and 45+ as the highest).
Low, medium and high usage levels ALL seemed to follow the same pattern with failure rates peaking at 3 month and 3 year so temp is the easiest one for you to control to keep your drives around. (obviously low usage had lower failure than high)