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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.'"
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.
Acutally, yes, I do.
Its more than noise, however. We don't need a more efficient cooling system, we need a hard drive that uses less power and generates less heat.
The whole path that desktops are going down (except for the occasional exception such as a mac mini) is one of more power, more heat, more fans, more noise.
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.
So now we can build a whole class of hard drives that suck more power from the wall, confident that they won't make as much noise?
Am I the only one who sees the folly of this?
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Solid state is the future, but right now it is very slow, small, and expensive. Until they start offerring them at flash chip prices and in a SATA format so you can RAID enough of them together to get some usefull performance numbers stardard HD will still be on top.
Same way you abuse anything else - quantum physics (nuclear power or bombs), chemistry (medicines or nerve gas), arable land (corn for tortillas or petrol additive).
The abuse that I see here is that we should be smart enough to not abuse our knowledge and resources for short term gains at a long term cost.
What we do with the evolution in technology is our choice, certainly.
It was not so long ago that people used to laugh at why you would need a 200W power supply for a computer. Now it seems that 500 watts are common enough, and some are going significantly higher than this.
There is no law of physics that demanded this increase in power consumption. It was a choice by manufacturers and consumers.
There are certainly some times when it makes sense to throw the power at the circuitry, but for the most part its just wasted time. To my mind the ideal computer would run at close to 100% CPU utilisation all the time, but the whole system would reduce its power and speed to match the load requirements. Likewise, standby power should be very close to zero - we do this for laptops so much better than for many desktops.
I guess its my personal ethos showing here. Nothing more, nothing less.
Anyway, I hope that explains my position on why I think its an abuse. Energy is cheap, but it may not be for too much longer.
The world really doesn't need a hard drive that sucks more power quietly, at least not for most computers.
Hopefully in a few short years flash drives will overtake hard drives and everyone wins.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
It was not so long ago that people used to laugh at why you would need a 200W power supply for a computer. Now it seems that 500 watts are common enough, and some are going significantly higher than this.
They're nowhere near as common as enthusiast sites would have you believe, and even in most machines that have them, they're not using anything close to 500W of juice.
The average PC is a low-end desktop that probably barely even peaks at much over 100W of power draw.
There is no law of physics that demanded this increase in power consumption.
Sure there is. It's the cost of greater computing power, within the limitations of current technology.
Hopefully in a few short years flash drives will overtake hard drives and everyone wins.
Flash drives aren't going to replace hard disks in the near future as they are highly unlikely to be able to come close to the same size/cost ratio of hard disks.
I have used that site extensively for the design of my computer. It's the quietest PC I've ever encountered.
Noise is a huge problem these days, and I'd expect it to especially affect the Slashdot readership, since the majority of them are likely to be introverts. Introverts suffer from brain overstimulation all the time. Noise, crowds, situations that require constant attention to multiple variables, push us over the edge and drive us nuts. This is why we are drawn to jobs that require hours of uninterrupted attention, such as those in programming or academia. We find such things calming and are very good at them.
The effect of PC noise, however, is not one of which I was aware until I was working on my master's thesis and, just as an experiment, put on the noise-canceling headphones I use on planes while I was sitting at my desk writing. They killed the sound of my 3 80mm fans, the 60mm on my video card, and the smaller one on my southbridge. In one shot, I wrote for 6 hours straight, blissfully focused.
After that, I spent a lot of time and money upgrading my computer to be as silent as possible. I have a fanless PSU. A large, slow Zalman CPU cooler. I replaced the southbridge fan with a heatsink. I have a fanless video card. Air flow is achieved via 2 slow 120mm fans. Hard drives are mounted on rubber grommets.
All that being said, the computer is still noisier than I'd like, and 100% of the perceptible noise is that of the hard drives (well, CD/DVD drives don't really count, because you don't usually use them). I use only Seagate drives, which seem to be the quietest, but anything that could further reduce the whine (without mounting my drives on surgical tubing, something you can read about at SilentPCReview) would be absolutely welcome.
Just as the constant whine of an airplane's engines causes you to be exhausted at your destination, the constant whine of fans and other moving parts can exhaust you in front of your computer. I welcome any development to further reduce the noise footprint of today's PCs!