how shall I water cool a harddisk

Sendorm · Post by **Sendorm** » Fri Oct 06, 2006 11:15 am

Ok, I've been looking for a way to effectively cool down my 2 harddisks. I've examined several different apporaches to the matter.

1)For instance, this guy completely ignores the chipset cooling.
http://www.webx.dk/oz2cpu/pcmod/water.htm#HD

2)This guy uses a somewhat better approach to the chip side cooling. But a thermal pad might have been better such as the one used in thermaltake's product ( http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Thermaltake/M4/4 )

http://www.digital-explosion.co.uk/inde ... ticleID=31

What I am thinking right now is the second guy's aproach without the active cooling between the two harddisks or think of it like the first guys approach, but with two heatsinks on both sides of the harddisks connected by a silicon tubing.

Will this be enough, what do you think?

Sendorm · Post by **Sendorm** » Sat Oct 07, 2006 2:26 pm

well it's actually funny.
But I've found those two modders talking about their designs in a watercooling forum.
They both agree that the middle active cooling is an overkill. So I'll do the cooler without the middle part.

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php? ... t=harddisk

jamesavery22 · Post by **jamesavery22** » Sun Oct 08, 2006 10:27 am

If you are trying to watercool harddrives as a novelty by all means do so. But its really not going to do much. HD's have a pretty large tolerance. And they only need a breeze to keep them from getting hot. Unless you are watercooling absolutely everything you need some airflow in your case. Just position your HD's so they are right after the "intake" of your case so they get some airflow. Dont even need to have a fan directly on them. Suspending them in 5-1/4" bays are a good start.

Sendorm · Post by **Sendorm** » Sun Oct 08, 2006 10:38 am

Actually I am not trying anything fancy. I just dont like the idle whine of the system. The harddisk whinining is currently the only noise source in my system.

This is my current rig.
http://img217.imageshack.us/my.php?image=img00134gp.jpg

The harddisks are hard mounted to the harddisk cage. Which also has a fan. All the system is wrapped with shirts. But i just cant seem to stop the idle whine. There is no vibrations or any seek noise at all. AAM is enabled for both drives.

I want to water cool them, so that i can wrap them all the way around without any openings which in turn let the idle whining noise out.

jamesavery22 · Post by **jamesavery22** » Mon Oct 09, 2006 5:45 am

Why not just get better drives? watercooling = bolting plates to the harddrive, just more material to vibrate.

Sendorm · Post by **Sendorm** » Mon Oct 09, 2006 6:34 am

well, I am using samsung sata drives right now, which appear to be the most silent drives avaliable at my home town. The drives are actually quite nice, vibrations are minimal. But as I've mentioned before, the high frequency whine is bothering me.

Water cooling and wrapping them seemed to be the most reasonable solution to me, since I am already water cooling.

All the suggestions are welcome. That's why I am posting here :)

Thanks

Bat · Post by **Bat** » Sat Oct 14, 2006 12:45 pm

You could consider a length of that soft 10mm-diameter copper piping for household plumbing, squashed against the sides of the drive enough to flatten it a bit, with some thermal paste.

The idea of sealing it up and watercooling it seems sensible to me.
Somewhere on here a while back I read of someone doing something similar, with dense foam and printing-block rubbery stuff.

jaganath · Post by **jaganath** » Sat Oct 14, 2006 1:16 pm

the high frequency whine is bothering me.

Have you thought about simply using a hard-drive enclosure like the Scythe Quiet Drive? It's had very good reviews on here for keeping drives both quiet AND cool:

Scythe Quiet Drive enclosure, It's Good

snutten · Post by **snutten** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 3:50 pm

Keep in mind that the water temp must be kept lower (>42C or smthng) with hdds in the loop.

zds · Post by **zds** » Tue Nov 07, 2006 6:15 pm

If I read correctly, your hard drives are hard-mounted. Try detaching them and holding them in your hand to get some idea about how much noise they'd make on elastic suspension.. if that does not satisfy you, only then consider some enclosure.

Personally I am running 160G single-platter Barracuda 7200.10 and I in fact ended up putting it on the bare metal on the case floor, so that I could hear it seeking if I wanted to

. Machine just freezing without any feedback is a lot more annoying than being able to listen and notice the hard drive seeking.

But this is without elastic suspension, and I really need to concentrate to hear the noise.. so you should be able to get pretty quiet by suspending.

jamesavery22 wrote:Why not just get better drives? watercooling = bolting plates to the harddrive, just more material to vibrate.

This is a bit misleading. More material == more weight == more energy needed to cause same amount of vibration == lower-frequency vibration. In other words: by attaching the drive firmly to a heavy thick block of metal you'd move the vibration to sub-hearing levels.

I've actually played around with idea of attaching drive directly to large aluminium heatsink (the amplifier size, not the semiconductor size..) and then sealing it inside insulation foam. Some 2 kilos of metal is tough job to get vibrating with ~10W of power and then cooling wouldn't be an issue

.

Ryan · Post by **Ryan** » Wed Nov 08, 2006 12:12 am

It's a waste of money. If you want to make a huge difference, put a ton of weights on it firmly (like a big heatsink on the bottom and top and sides), then soft mount it, give it proper breathing room, and damping materials.

zds · Post by **zds** » Wed Nov 08, 2006 3:33 am

Ryan wrote:It's a waste of money. If you want to make a huge difference, put a ton of weights on it firmly (like a big heatsink on the bottom and top and sides), then soft mount it, give it proper breathing room, and damping materials.

And if you want to take advantage of the water loop, sandwitch HD between thick aluminium/copper blocks and route some otherwise existing piece of the loop in copper pipe over the block and possibly clamp it to press it more firmly to the huge blocks.

Copper pipe is available in very soft varieties and this way you'd not increase the loop resistance with any significant amount.

zds · Post by **zds** » Wed Nov 08, 2006 3:36 am

zds wrote:And if you want to take advantage of the water loop, sandwitch HD between thick aluminium/copper blocks

Or any heavy metal, for that matter. I mean, HDDs really do not produce so much of heat, and you want the construction to weight a lot (as weight is good dampener). Thus even steel might work, and it is both cheap and reasonably dense. Just make sure to decouple the blocks from the case to prevent thin sheets from catching the vibration.

Sendorm · Post by **Sendorm** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 4:13 am

I've just skipped the idea of water cooling the harddisk. Wrapping in tshirts is satisfactory for now (as the ambient room noise increased due to the radiator's pump heating up all the apartment).

bluepanda · Post by **bluepanda** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 6:38 am

This may be a tad late considering you dont wanna water cool ur hard disks anymore but i would just like to point out an interesting little product i found. Its called the alphacool silent star. http://www.chilledpc.com.au/store/produ ... 556e9fd1b0
It basically is an enclosue for one or 2 hard drives with all the sound proofing needed to quiet them down but also has watercooling blocks inside to keep the hard disk cool! Just wanted to point this one out as it seems pretty interesting.

n00btard · Post by **n00btard** » Mon Nov 27, 2006 7:56 pm

bluepanda wrote:This may be a tad late considering you dont wanna water cool ur hard disks anymore but i would just like to point out an interesting little product i found. Its called the alphacool silent star. http://www.chilledpc.com.au/store/produ ... 556e9fd1b0
It basically is an enclosue for one or 2 hard drives with all the sound proofing needed to quiet them down but also has watercooling blocks inside to keep the hard disk cool! Just wanted to point this one out as it seems pretty interesting.

$146 AUS!

for watercooling the drive and soft-mounting it, it doesn't get much cheaper than this: http://www.aquatuning.de/product_info.p ... -G1-4.html

heck, oversea shipping costs more than the damn thing

and I've never seen the interior of the block, so I don't know how effective it really is...

unimatrix0 · Post by **unimatrix0** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 4:36 pm

n00btard wrote:for watercooling the drive and soft-mounting it, it doesn't get much cheaper than this: http://www.aquatuning.de/product_info.p ... -G1-4.html

heck, oversea shipping costs more than the damn thing

and I've never seen the interior of the block, so I don't know how effective it really is...

Hey cool store, they even have some of Alphacool's HD rare beauties. How do you order? I made an account but I can't see shipping charges and the fact that it's in German doesn't help...

n00btard · Post by **n00btard** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 6:41 pm

unimatrix0 wrote:
n00btard wrote:for watercooling the drive and soft-mounting it, it doesn't get much cheaper than this: http://www.aquatuning.de/product_info.p ... -G1-4.html

heck, oversea shipping costs more than the damn thing

and I've never seen the interior of the block, so I don't know how effective it really is...
Hey cool store, they even have some of Alphacool's HD rare beauties. How do you order? I made an account but I can't see shipping charges and the fact that it's in German doesn't help...

they DO ship to the states...

A guy from XS bought a Watercool Heatkiller block from them.

$30 shipping

they understand English, send e-mail to [email protected]

they accept Paypal

run site through translator like Google, like I do =P

dean.collins · Post by **dean.collins** » Sun Dec 03, 2006 9:02 am

bluepanda wrote:This may be a tad late considering you dont wanna water cool ur hard disks anymore but i would just like to point out an interesting little product i found. Its called the alphacool silent star. http://www.chilledpc.com.au/store/produ ... 556e9fd1b0
It basically is an enclosue for one or 2 hard drives with all the sound proofing needed to quiet them down but also has watercooling blocks inside to keep the hard disk cool! Just wanted to point this one out as it seems pretty interesting.

I use silent stars, not cheap but work fantastic and quality is great.

Cheers,
Dean