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New Water-Cooled Hard Drives Coming

Posted by Zonk on from the can't-stop-the-fire dept.

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.'"

8 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Go to SilentPCReview... by mrchaotica · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...and be enlightened.

    --

    "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

  2. Re:Grammar is not offtopic. by chengmi · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you're going to complain about the grandparent's post over an apostrophe, you'd better make damn sure that your post is perfect.

    Hint: CAPTCHA is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart

  3. Re:Whisper by rm999 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Very accurate. 30 db is about 4x more powerful than 24 db (i know you said 25, but when working with decibels you want to work in units of 3). The inverse square law says that power is inversely proportional to square of distance. Therefore, something that is 4x as powerful sounds the same at sqrt(10^2 * 4) = 20 meters

    BTW, I believe 30 db is a soft whisper at 5 meters, not 10. So something at 24 db would sound like a whisper from 10 meters - still, not bad.

  4. Re:And the market is? by Charcharodon · · Score: 2, Informative
    This is a niche market item one that I have a use for in my media PC since it is already plumbed for water cooling and my end goal is to make it 100% silent. Solid state drives are very interesting they use less than 1 watt and are compeletely silent and fairly cool, but they are very slow and the price per unit is unacceptable for my storage needs. If I were to use them it would be to simply to make a front device for the living room and then put a full blown noisy server in a closet someplace else in the house.

    Now as far as power useage, HD's are hardly the big pig in the PC, most pull all of 5-10watts and considering how fast they seem to double in capacity, that just drives the power consumption per unit of storage down requiring fewer drives and less power to get the same results.

    The biggest wasters are the CPU, Video Card, and the Power supply. We have seen some big improvements these past few years it's just that those gains have been for the most part entirely devoted to improving performance rather than power efficiency.

    This is, to my mind, the grossest abuse of Moore's law that can be had. Instead, we should be building smaller and lower powered devices. Perhaps it simply reflects how cheap energy is that we choose to build computers this way.

    I never understood the whole let's live off of bark and roots mentality of the long haired hippy freak crowd, but just like cars if you want one that is very efficient then go get one, they are readily available. The average performing PC and Mac is exactly what you are wanting to see built and are getting more so every year, but if what you want is a high-performance gaming rig, well then you are going to have to take a hit in the gas mileage to get it. That's just the way it is.

    I'm not all about shitting on mother earth, I for one think water cooling a PC is a wonderfull opportunity to be a little more eco-friendly. When I move back into the states next year and buy a house, I plan on setting up my big giant noisy, BOINC number crunching, water cooled media server next to an extra water heater tank that I'll set up. That way I can use the waste heat of the machine to pre-heat water for the main hot water heater.

  5. Re:Just one question: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Yes that's all well and good, but will it be efficient?

    From TFS: 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.'

    Duh, gee Feep. I dunno.

  6. Cool drives? by vidarlo · · Score: 2, Informative

    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
  7. Re:And the market is? by cecil_turtle · · Score: 3, Informative

    HEAT? put a fan across the drives make a GIANT difference in drive longevity. You may be interested in reading this article and for even more information this paper. Apparently Google collects performance/environmental/failure data against their entire computing infrastructure and has over 5 years worth of this data. In this analysis (of likely hundreds of thousands of drives of different types / manufacturers over a long period) they found little to no correlation between heat and failure rate of the drives.

    Power use, well that one you have a choice. Low power and slow. high power and fast. please pick one. To better qualify that statement, "slow" and "fast" are only relative to each other, not necessarily a user's experience on a particular application. A high percentage of the time, a "slow" machine will suffice just fine (as per your example).
  8. Mod Parent Up - liquid cooled hdd's aren't new by Zantetsuken · · Score: 2, Informative
    Mod the parent up - liquid cooled HDD's aren't new at all. Maybe this model is or its one more company manufacturing the stuff, but definitely not new, and though a lot of us here on /. are gear-heads that look at just about everything on the market before making a buy, it definitely isn't news for nerds - TFA states its for desktops and

    "To do this, NEC and Hitachi actually wrap the hard drive in "noise absorbing material and vibration insulation."
    Which sounds exactly like every HDD cooling kit I've heard of.

    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...