Closing the lid

With the project down I figured this would be a good time to perform the various system maintenances, cleanups and reorganizings I had been putting off. I was swapping out some drives and a question came to me...

How many of you fine crunching persons take off the chassis side cover(s) on day one and never put it(them) back ?
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The Poopsmith speaketh

I have 1 of 2 covers on. This is 50% above normal.
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Janice

My covers are back on, seems they help with air flow.

However that is a new thing for me, they are normally left off so that I can get to the cables to hook drives up, however now I use external cases and just put the drives in them to get data off or do necessary work to the data on that drive.

The WHS has always had its cover on as I built that in a micro case and all the drives are external on a single powersupply and hub.

The sides are never screwed on, waiting to be slid off at a moments notice.
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I must be in the minority then as both of my PC crunchers have the sides on, of course the computer that I use as the DVR has the top off because I have a full size card in a low profile case.

Dua What good is a rear fan if the sides are off?

Air needs flow across hot components from a cooler source to work
like front to back, bottom to top too many holes in the side can render an air flow pattern almost useless

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I leave the side of mine on. I have found that if I take it off, the temps go up 15C, and with my CPUs already near the max temp spec, I can't afford to risk it.

Plus it cuts down on the dust bunnies.
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Linux laptop uptime: 1484d 22h 42m
Ended due to UPS failure, found 14 hours after the fact

I thought keeping case sides on helped with cooling. + yes I agree re bunnies.

Switching to the CoolerMaster HAF932 cases allowed me to leave the case sides on again. The left side is the fan side, and the right has a great cable management function. Of course, airflow is no problem in this case series.
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I agree with Ribbeck here. I always run my cases with their sides on. Some of them don't have their screws in so I can take them off at any moment, but generally I leave the screws on as I hardly open the cases but once every other month for dusting. I find that if I leave the covers off, they tend to get dirtier (though I do live in a very dusty area), and the airflow seems to be better when I leave the sides on.

The sides come off mine every 3-4 months to blow the dust out and then the sides go back on.

Cheers.
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Unfortunately I can't put all my machines in a rack-type environment. My justification of even having them is that they are my LAN gaming machines for those times when we have LAN gaming parties. Each one is setup with a mouse, keyboard and monitor so they can be used by a person.

I at least made my network management easier on myself by finally upgrading to Domain Controllers on my LAN.