Well, kinda... 
With the summer here and my 622's temps rising, I decided to make a little modification to my unit to make up for the poor thermal design the engineers settled on - I decided to mount my 622's hard drive on the outside of the case.
I did this for two reasons:
#1) The inside of the 622 gets HOT! This is primarily due to the hard drive and to a lesser extent the processing chips inside the case. Air flow through the 622 is crap basically. One very small 50mm fan is used and it just doesn't cut it in my opinion. By mounting the 622's hard drive outside of the case it not only runs much cooler, it also frees up space inside for better air flow and doesn't contribute any of its own heat to the already sweltering internal case temps.
#2) Heat kills hard drives - or at least considerably shortens their lifespans. By running the drive on the outside, it runs much cooler. My 622 is mounted fairly high on my audio rack, so there is very little danger of it getting disturbed or bumped or touched. I've also mounted a small 90mm Panaflow PC Case fan behind the hard drive to make sure it stays nice and cool. This fan is whisper quiet and provides great air flow over the drive. I'm powering it via a small external transformer that spits out 12V @ 500ma.
In addition to mounting the drive externally, I also slapped some small, fanless heatsinks with some artic silver 5 heatsink compound on the three largest/hottest chips on the 622's board while I had the case open - so that should also help it shed the heat much better.
Please realize that taking the 622's hard drive and mounting it outside the case probably voids your warranty - but if you've had the unit for more than a year, there isn't really any warranty to worry about, is there?
When and if true USB 2.0 support for external drives is made available by Dish, I'll simply place another drive alongside my externally mounted internal drive.
Some pics:
Cheers!
--Supercharged_Z06
With the summer here and my 622's temps rising, I decided to make a little modification to my unit to make up for the poor thermal design the engineers settled on - I decided to mount my 622's hard drive on the outside of the case.
I did this for two reasons:
#1) The inside of the 622 gets HOT! This is primarily due to the hard drive and to a lesser extent the processing chips inside the case. Air flow through the 622 is crap basically. One very small 50mm fan is used and it just doesn't cut it in my opinion. By mounting the 622's hard drive outside of the case it not only runs much cooler, it also frees up space inside for better air flow and doesn't contribute any of its own heat to the already sweltering internal case temps.
#2) Heat kills hard drives - or at least considerably shortens their lifespans. By running the drive on the outside, it runs much cooler. My 622 is mounted fairly high on my audio rack, so there is very little danger of it getting disturbed or bumped or touched. I've also mounted a small 90mm Panaflow PC Case fan behind the hard drive to make sure it stays nice and cool. This fan is whisper quiet and provides great air flow over the drive. I'm powering it via a small external transformer that spits out 12V @ 500ma.
In addition to mounting the drive externally, I also slapped some small, fanless heatsinks with some artic silver 5 heatsink compound on the three largest/hottest chips on the 622's board while I had the case open - so that should also help it shed the heat much better.
Please realize that taking the 622's hard drive and mounting it outside the case probably voids your warranty - but if you've had the unit for more than a year, there isn't really any warranty to worry about, is there?
When and if true USB 2.0 support for external drives is made available by Dish, I'll simply place another drive alongside my externally mounted internal drive.
Some pics:
Cheers!
--Supercharged_Z06
