How to cool the kit?

#1

Hello,
I’m new here!

I’m a new owner of the quad sata kit for a rpi4.
I tried to set it up, everything works with 4x1TB hdd. But it is very hot, around 60°c for the cpu…

I saw that this is a known problem and that there are several solutions: return the fans, change the fans,…

I’m a bit lost. What actually work well?

Thanks in advance.

#2

Hi Tom,

There’s a lengthy discussion to varying degrees of success at:

I have 4x250gb SSDs in mine and a RPi 4 8GB. I think at heavy load, the pi is likely to thermal throttle in sustained usage OR have your fans going flat out 100% by default. But this isn’t something I’ve tried because my usage is fairly low for now. Also, to be fair as a NAS, I’d say access is often speradic, a docker server however running sites, uploading, downloading and serving stuff like media round the house may be more liable to push your temps up.

General highlights I’d provide is:

  • Reversing the fans helped a little bit, I had to find more bolts to do it and ended up swapping it back.
  • Replacing the top fan with a Noctua made it near silent but reduced airflow further, (so as is commented by others in that post) sent their CPU fan higher.
  • Adding better ventilation at the bottom and as suggested by others, better sealing the top fan grille around the fan, should cause greater airflow.
  • Doing almost all of the above and replacing the CPU fan for just an XL heatsink, seems to have made mine near silent and maintaining 50-52 degrees on the CPU, 38-45 degrees on HDDs which I’m happy with.

I guess, do what you’re comfortable with and start there. It took me at least a few weeks to start doing more extreme stuff with Dremels. And it’s not like you need to do anything, the unit works but the fans are a bit noisy.

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#3

Do you have some references about your heatsink? Difficult to find something in good size to let the board pass

#4

The whole chassis is a heatsink… best results observed just slapping a fan to the body of the unit and blow…

#5

More vent holes in the case Low down seems to work and insuring HD spin down. or run in a more eco mode.

Due to the Pi and if yo urun raid its in software you not going to lose preformance but not running drives in “preformace mode” and this in its self will drop the heat out put from them and help cool the over all system.

But number one is air flow to pull the heat out, so best is to have opening both ends of case and fans to pull / push the air through. which you can achive 2 ways

  1. better fans with existing vents which can pull more air though the restricted space
  2. create more vents for better air flow with existing fans

Doing both will get best results.

Remeber hot air rises an the hottest part of the set up is the CPU, so idealy you want air flow from top to bottom to aid the fans and I put hold in the side of the case in the bottom 1/4 (2 inches) so air flow in on to the pi board and then drawn up through the disk to exit out the top.

even with top fan off the natural air flow keeps CPU below 45 degrees unless I am really hammering it. once I am hammering it and the fan kicks in it still stays <70.

Pi is designed to run warm and disk as long as they are <50 should be ok, though I like mine at idle to be <40 and pi cpu <50.

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