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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.'"

3 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: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.

  3. 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).