Harddrive dust - something to worry about?

Got 4 harddrives on my computer. It's been 5 years now since the first one. Over the years I've been adding another harddrive to the system every now and then and even changed the whole system an year ago, but kept the drives.

I know just how dusty it can get in there, heck the dust had turned into DIRT on my memory slots, but it's never been a problem for me. However, a month ago is when I bought my 4th drive. This 320GB WD gets pretty hot when operating, so I added two fans to it, a case fan on top and a HDD fan at the bottom, both needed just so the drive would stay at a constant 51 degrees in both idle and hour-long intense activity modes.

I've read alot about HDD fans causing alot of dust to accumulate. Well with the case fan there's quite a bit of dust on top of the drive, but I don't really care about that. It's the bottom that I'm worried about. There's even more dust there, and it's where the drive's circuit board is. Should I be concerned about dust accumulation there and the potential of it doing something nasty to the drive?

 

Too much dust will make things get too hot.
The fans you have are sucking dust from the room into your PC, like you are using your PC as a dust filter.
Take off the case fan and turn it around so it blows air into the PC. Cut a piece of humidifier pad and put it outside the case where the case fan sits, this makes a dust filter. Now you are blowing clean air into PC keeping dust out.

 

Dust will get it hot again eh? Then I'll be checking the drive temp regularly over the months to come to see when/if it starts getting hotter. Also, too lazy to do the fan thing... at least for the moment.

 

You should take the PSU out, take the cover off it and blow the dust off with compressed air, before it cooks itself.
BUT i guess youre too lazy for that too Eh?..

 

My PSU is arguably the coolest heat-producing component in the entire comp. This Thermaltake has a fan blowing on the side, and a mammoth fan on its bottom.

 

OIC
i guess dust dont get a chance to settle in there then Eh?
when i blew the dust out of my oldie oldest PC there was so much dust in the PSU that i wondered why it never caught fire...

 

No other component in the pc is subject to such high thermal stress for several reasons. This is why a psu failure is by far the most likely and common hardware failure in the pc. You don't need to open the psu case to blow the gunge out with compressed air.

The thermal stress is higher partly because the psu is always on, unlike other components which works in bursts and get 'rest time'.
Partly because of the higher voltages involved heavy duty dropper resistors are employed. These are notably unreliable components.
The switching transistors are subject to positive feedback phenomenon called 'thermal runaway'
Because of the higher voltages a greater level of insulation has to be used, again this keeps heat in more and..

 

Well Searinox....
I guess we been told Eh?
I had to take the cover off my PSU to get the grunge off, even then 100PSI air could not get it all off i had to brush it with an artists brush along with the air pressure. If i would have waited another week there would have been hair growing out of the PSU.