I have a lot of trouble with dust, so I'm thinking of getting some aluminum filters for my intake fans. Unfortunately this means I have to get at my not so accessable from fan every once in a while to clean the filter.

I have 3 hard drives, so the fan is partially blocked by hard drives (spaced one drive slot apart each). So I am left with putting the fan behind the front cover (hard to take off, but I'm working on a quick release mechanism).

So this got me thinking...these case fans really don't deal with pressure or lack of pressure well. So my question is which side of a fan should a filter be placed, the sucking side, or the blowing side? Does it make a difference? Any one have any suggestions on what filters to get?

I'm personally looking at the UV reactive aluminum 2 piece filters at www.bigfootcomputers.com in the Fans->80mm Filter section because I like the 2 piece design. Let me know what filters you prefer.

Thanks

Surely you would put the filters on the outside of the fan? Stop the fan getting caked in dust, and actually ensure the fan can draw air through?

You are going to need to clean those filters on a regular basis, so try not to make them too hard to get access to. Don't know too much about the fancy UV reactive filters - I'm supposed I'm old fashioned in that I don't want my PC lighting up like a christmas tree =:-P. I basically found that on my case all the plastic outside tack/rubbish didn't fit in properly, so I just took the actual filter material out of my filters, and used 'electrical' tape (the black/blue stuff - don't use sellotape[1] for this!) on the edges to stick them over where my fans where.

[1] LinuxQuestions agrees with me, the top spelling reccomendation for sellotape being 'sellout' (I suppose their dictionary doesn't like brand names)