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New Water-Cooled Hard Drives Coming
CoolHandLuke writes "NEC and Hitachi are teaming up on a liquid cooling system for hard drives. The goal is to cut down on noise levels while providing more efficient cooling. 'Hitachi and NEC are developing the water-cooled hard drive systems for desktop computers mainly to reduce noise levels to 25 decibels, 5 decibels quieter than a whisper. To do this, NEC and Hitachi actually wrap the hard drive in "noise absorbing material and vibration insulation." According to Hitachi and NEC, the cooling cold plate they're planning to use is the most efficient plate ever used for heat conduction, which means they'll be able to cool the hard drives quicker and more efficiently.'"
Nothing for you to see here. Please swim along.
I believe you mean "quicklier and efficientlier."
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan
The obvious market for water cooled CPU's is to achieve maximum performance. While quiet is good for the consumer sector in general do people really find HDD noise annoying enough at 7.5K rotational speeds to justify the extra cost and complexity? And surely those running 15K drives and hyper-fast CPUs for server and high-performance applications already have so much cooling in place that a little extra drive noise makes little difference.
I don't see the current noise level of hard disks excessive.
The biggest factor in keeping them down to acceptable levels is just mounting them on soft rubber grommits.
This works well enough to keep the machine under my TV acceptably quiet.
Yes that's all well and good, but will it be efficient?
For the extra cost of water cooling and sound insulation, why not just make the switch to a solid state drive? You can then eliminate the risks of mechanical failure which are now compounded by this water cooling apparatus. If you want quiet and are willing to pay more for it then go with an SSD and get reliability and much lower latency thrown in at no extra cost.
What this smells like is innovation for the preservation of a certain price point and profit margin. Might be a good time to vote with dollars and simply say, "No thanks."
Several people have already commented that they don't see the need for this, which is what I was going to say
(because the hum of my harddrive is much less than the hum of several other things in my apartment, and much much less than I-5, which is just outside my window)
But I imagine that there is still a few niche markets where the additional cost would be worth it. Is this designed for computers that are to be used in operating rooms, or research labs, or some other exotic locale where noise has to be kept down to a minimum?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
...I had a soundproofed equipment room. My systems were mounted in racks in there. The monitors and input devices were on extender cables. I used external CDROM and floppy drives, also on extender cables. Silent computing, it was heaven. Now that I've moved to a smaller place I have to share workspace with those racks and systems. It's like trying to function in a steel mill, and I hate it. So yeah, almost anything which effectively cuts the white noise quotient down in the home is worth paying for in some circumstances.
Doesn't the majority of the noise come from the CPU fan? I thought they were already well on their way to fixing this problem with ionic cooling
after all it's not the noise of my hard drives that bugs me, it's the noise from the CPU fan. Fix this problem and I would say the sound problem is pretty much solved.
"25 decibels, 5 decibels quieter than a whisper."
That's a ******* loud whisper!!
No, it's not.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
...and be enlightened.
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That's nice and all...but even birds know how to cool themselves off with water. What we need is improved flash memory or 3D holographic storage. When we begin from a more advanced base, problems such as noise, overheating, and data corruption/disk failure will be inherently less common.
I'm not saying this plate isn't an improvement, but it essentially patches outdated technology by means of an added degree of complexity--which, IMHO, is not the most favorable direction to take.
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I sure hope it's a LOT quieter than a whisper. If my machine sounded anything like as loud as a person constantly whispering I think I'd go out of my mind.
A-Bomb
...that this is utterly stupid.
I run all sorts of RAID arrays on a single box, from 0 to 6, and I've had points in time where they're all read/writing simultaneously. When they're idle, I can't tell them apart from the fans I have in place to cool them or their enclosures, and even those aren't what I'd call loud. When all the disks seek at once, esp. for the RAID-6, the noise either gets relegated as background noise by my brain, or isn't heard at all over soft music. Sure, if you're running 15k U320's or something, maybe this is a good idea if you want that kind of performance in a desktop, but this just seems like it lacks a market. I'll continue to throw money at Seagate until the day I die, but not on something this stupid.
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Hard drives are very easy to cool. The water block plates don't fit snuggly against the uneven surface of the hard drives' sides. But it doesn't matter. The whole drive is still cool to the touch, much cooler than decent air cooling can manage. In short, there really isn't a need for "the most efficient plate ever". And it won't do you much good besides, as last I checked, hard drives are not very flat on the sides or bottom.
I think someone whispering as I try to sleep would be rather annoying...
"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." -Thomas Jefferson
More parts to breakdown and cause a system failure.
:)
I appreciate what they're doing here - for sure there's going to be a market, though I personally would be happier with passive solutions or better yet, a nice big fat FRAM drive
Predictions - what is the year of completely silent PC or Mac? I guess we're not that far from that. 2010 perhaps?
Is it louder than the sound of one hand clapping?
A while ago I saw a study from google that said disks running at 40C was most reliable. Cooler drives died faster, and warmer drives died faster. So why does the manufacturer try to cool 'em? Seems to me that reliability increases if you don't keep 'em at 20C like many people do. And 40C is the temperature my 7200RPM disks reach in a normal cabinet (well, actually 35-38C)...
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
This plays out every time exactly the same way and yet people fall for it every time. Just like SLi, water cooling is unnecessary. It is and has been used for bleeding edge performance *before* the technology is really at that level and certainly before the software is. If you wait 6month's to a year the hardware catches up, doesn;t need water cooling and around that time software begins to emerge that utilizes the new technology. So for 6 months you gain the ability to say oooh look at my watercooled setup that does nothing except maybe pump out high synthetic benchmarks since nothing utilizes it yet. Same with SLi.
No developer is going to produce for a market that may be 1% of the total market. Once the technology reaches mainstream use (which watercooling and SLi never will) they then begin to utilize it. This has gone on since the days of mainframes, and continues in cycles right up until today... when will people learn?
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Why don't these companies invest the R+D in simply making cheaper faster cooler flash drives?
So, they wrap the drive in foam to quiet it down - that makes the cold plate mandatory. No news there. We now have some kind of a pump - more noise added unless they are planning to use a thermosiphon setup. Now a heat exchanger/radiator is needed - free cooled maybe. But if a fan is needed - more noise. If a larger fan is needed for double duty - more noise. Now about replacing the drive when it fails and all the attendant issues with air bubbles, leakage, etc. No thanks - don't need the engineering/service headaches and ridiculous marketing hype.
That's a ******* loud whisper!!
No, it's not.
Well, to GP's credit, you're generally a tad closer than 5m to your computer. It's a 5m whisper is what it is. But I guess the rating on this is done in a completely silent science lab with guys in white coats and clipboards walking around, going, "Yeessss.... Mmmm-hmmmm.... I see...."
Who here wishes their job was like that? Especially if you were one of those guys that crashes cars to see how awesome they mangle the body.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Right now, my main PC has three fans devoted just to keeping my drives cooled.
My Tivo has long had the lid off and there's a special fan clamped next to it dedicated just to cooling the drive.
That's four fans worth of noise just for drive cooling, far and away MUCH louder than any other noise in this room.
If there's a way to keep them cold and quiet, I am in.
Sig for hire.
I think they are trying to stretch the old technology to stay ahead of solid state drives.
;)
I doubt it's the "most efficient heat dissipating" but I think someone would shriek if they were to announce they're making the casing out of massive chunk of beryllium oxide.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
From my own experience with flash drives made by several different manufacturers, my guess would be that they won't make your heat problem go away. I currently use about 10 flash drives on a frequent basis, all either 2GB or 4GB and from several different manufacturers. After writing, say, 1 GB of files to one of them I can tell you it is HOT to the touch. We're talking way more than 30 or 35 degrees C here - more like 50.
If you used flash for desktop storage right now I suspect a big array of flash drives - 20 x 2GB = 40GB for example - would really add to the cooling burden inside the case. Maybe as technology improves (i.e. circuitry gets smaller on the chips) the excess heat per unit of storage will drop. Or maybe it won't, like if instead of smaller circuitry we simply get more layers of the same within the chip.
Speed is a problem with flash too, but that should be easier to fix and is also off topic.
Those cool HDs probably were dead, because 20C is around DC temperature and it's unlikely a HD with a working motor will have such temperature. Probably the motor was dead and only the circuit board was working.
Also these studies are probably focused on next generation HDs, which will have speeds higher than 7.2k HDs used by Google.
...when they can make a hard drive to rival the performance of my Raptors, and then I'll be impressed.
Feh.
There is simply too much glass..
http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/index.php?m ain_page=product_info&products_id=4520
Alphacool silent stars rock. I own 3 of these and the 4th server in my rack (without one) makes more noise than the rest combined (just waiting for some other parts befoe I can watercool everything in the 4th pc as well.
Unfortunately the $100 for the Silent star is just the start as you then need to buy pumps/rads etc but for $500 you can have a silent pc (or spend the extra $250 for a water cooled power supply and have a really cool - extremely quiet pc).
Check out www.collins.net.pr/blog if you want to read more about some of the other water cooled stuff I have.
Cheers,
Dean
Didn't google discover that heat isn't a big factor in hard drive reliability? This is more about moving waste heat around versus generating less of it.
I'm all for quiet, though.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
Methinks you've merely discovered one expression of the diagnosis Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
"The real question about water cooling for platter based technology is... Why? Especially when solid state is about to overtake platter technology."
Using the slash version of "overtake". Economics favor mechanical storage devices for now. The other technologies will eventually catch up, but at the pace most people outgrow their hardware? It will not matter if they go with the present solution.
I much favor MRAM over flash anyway. Fewer disadvantages, and easier to get over the economic curve.
"What this smells like is innovation for the preservation of a certain price point and profit margin"
The water cooling of computers predates most of this audience. This is just the consumer version of what industry has enjoyed for decades. Now if you want to continue to put up with hotter and hotter drives, with noisier cooling devices and higher failure rates? Be my guest. You'll increase their profit margin far more than those who base their buying decisions on common sense.
It's funny to see even a technology type website ignore this fact.
A decibel is the measurement of the difference between two values. Without knowing what your measurement is relative to, a phrase like "25 decibels" is meaningless. It'd be like saying "my computer is 3 times faster" in response to someone asking you how fast your computer is. Faster than what? "5 decibels quieter than a whisper" is slightly more informative, since we now know that the value in question will be between, roughly, 1/2 and 1/4 of the loudness of a whisper.
In this case it may be assumed that they're talking about dB SPL A-weighted (or dB(A)), since that's the most common method of measuring loudness, but it's far from the only method. The other weighting methods (dB(B) and dB(C), iirc) will have different values for the same perceived loudness.
Most people don't have an intuitive sense of how different decibel values relate to each other. While it's easy to look at a SPL rating of 24 dB(A) and see that it's less than 30 dB(A) (6 less! yay!), most people would assume the 24 to be 80% the loudness of the 30 instead of its actual value, closer to 25% (a logarithmic scale instead of a liner scale). An easy rule of thumb for power level ratings (dB SPL and most audio-related ratios) is that a difference of 3dB means roughly a halving or doubling of the power (volume) while a difference of 10dB is a ten-fold increase or decrease.
Common sense might be the recognition that this will all come to naught when all of our non-mission-critical computers - and streetlights - will see their final power cycling when the full effects of Peak Oil are felt. Electricity to power them will become a luxury most of us can't afford. There's no free-as-in-beer energy. Even solar has substantial limits. All the attempts to sustainably duplicate petroleum as a stored form of energy are laughable, because they require more energy to create than they release when "burned".
Once the petrol dwindles enough, it may very well be back to horse-and-buggy days for most of us, and discussions like this will become moot. There's your common sense, dude. I'm not trying to hijack my own subthread with a tangent, I'm just sayin'... one man's "common sense" is another man's non sequitur.
The only way I could see somebody having a "need" for something like this is if they were "serious" and going to spend loads of cash on an HTPC rig where they wanted to silence their HDD's in it - except anybody that wants to put in that much effort is likely going to keep HDD's out of the front-end and use a small CF card or USB flash drive instead and make a back-end server to sit in the closet with all the storage HDD's...
I'm far more interested in the emerging hard drive technologies that don't require moving parts. The first markets that this is/will be impacting are the smartphone/media player/laptop markets, making the first possible and dramatically improving the experience of the later two. It's only a matter of time before speed and capacity begin to make them a compelling desktop option as well.
Sizzla Jizzla Baby, Sizzla FAWKING Jizzla!!
No, its about has loud as a tree falling in the forest when there is no one there to hear it.
And there you have why I haven't done much with it since moving to my new apartment in Tokyo. This building is crawling with kids, and, being Japanese kids, they do nothing but scream. Right outside my window. Right next to where I have to set my computer up.
But at least there's my office on campus. Only there there's a telephone and panicked coworkers asking for stats help with their unsalvageable research project 2 days before presenting at some conference. Not too bad during summer vacation, though.
My experience has been that if you only have a single 7200 rpm drive with half decent ventilation in the computer case, HDD temps keep well below 50 degrees celsius (122 F). This is why standard issue PCs don't have heatsinks and fans on them. 10k HDDs and RAID arrays are a different matter.
:), dramatically reducing computer noise (trust me, you'll be surprised). Assuming a good PSU and CPU cooler, much of the PC noise is caused by case resonance (in turn caused by HDD vibration), which is eliminated by decoupling the HDD and case. In addition to suppressing the idle noise to inaudibility, soft foam also almost eliminates seek noise (again mainly coming from the case), making the noise signature much nicer.
In these "normal" cases, you can simply decouple the hard drive from the case by placing it on soft foam pad (it stays there quite easily with gravity alone
For me, increase in temperature for me was only a few degrees, and it halved the noise my computer was making, at virtually no cost at all (foam was from packaging material of some old network card or such). This and lowering the CPU fan voltage with Zalman fanmate was enough to make my HTPC nearly inaudible, with total cost of 5.9 euros (around 9 dollars).
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