cooling disks on the sparcstation 20

At home, I've had an interest in running as little hardware
power as is needed, and repurposing used equipment (as
long as it is compact, quiet and cheap on power).

I'm gonna share a simple discovery I made related
to the Sparcstation 20.  I have 2 9GB 10K disks in mine,
and smartmon tools revealed the temperature was 47C
in the bottom drive, and 57C in the top drive.  The top
position exceeded the maximum posted by Seagate.

A little while ago, I bought a used Cisco switch to play around
with.  The fans in it were loud, and it was more CFM
air movement than really needed for the light load on my
home network.  I replaced the stock fans with
"Scythe Mini Kaze Ultra 40MM" fans available at NCIX.
For that reason, I had some spare Fonsan 6500 RPM 40mm fans (cisco originals),
which wonderfully line up with the holes in the sparcstation fan bracket
between the cdrom and hard drives of the sparcstation.  The
fan bracket is normally secured to the inside of the sparcstation with
a curved piece of metal like a tie clip, so this was a great find to see
I could get the more powerful fan to fasten using that.
The 2 pin  Fonsan fan was connected to the 4 pin molex through a chain
of 4 ->3->2 connector conversions (I don't like cutting wires).
The fan bracket was attached to the ex-Cisco fan
using the heavy duty tie wraps that come with kid's toys.

I check the temperature an hour later and both drives
have dropped about 10 degrees.

The power of 2x60Mhz processors on that sparcstation does
make one wait a couple of seconds longer when rendering xtide
graphs or graph view pages from cacti, but it works fine.  We probably
don't remember this always, but we were accustomed to waiting a few
seconds for computing tasks to complete in the past.  I can
get by with a 14 year old computer for my web server.  I don't need to
upgrade it to something having 6 times more power consumption.

--Donald