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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.'"
Yes that's all well and good, but will it be efficient?
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."
The biggest factor in keeping them down to acceptable levels is just mounting them on soft rubber grommits.
You also need fans to keep them cool. After the CPU and GPU, the hard drive is the hottest thing in your computer. Especially in drive arrays or servers, they can heat up extremely quickly with sustained usage.
If this works like it sounds, then it will not only quiet the drive, but cool it more efficiency and allow less external cooling (fans), which should quiet things down even more.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
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
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.
How much in a server room is actually water cooled? Server rooms seem to be the place where the people buying the hardware don't really care how loud it is.
Anyway, proper cooling doesn't mean loud. If you need a personal system, try silent PC review.
Right now, I have a Mac Pro with four 7200RPM hard drives, sitting three feet away, and I really don't hear the thing at all.
If that is too much to ask for then they just need to set up rows of SATA/USB ports that just let me plug 10-15 memeory sticks straight into the mother board so that a standard RAID solution can be used.
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?
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
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.
Personally I've moved to using iSCSI on my desktops. Every single one is booted off PXE and mounts its disks over the network (with very close to native performance; gigabit copes well with iSCSI, and the memory in the iSCSI target machines works nicely as cache). Blessed silence ensues, with care for CPU and PSU fans, the desktops become close to inaudible.
The server cabinet is slightly more noisy, but with care taken to soundproofing and with sound-absorbing vent channels and the disks mounted on vibration reducing material, it doesnt sound more than modern fridge.
Adding yet another cooling bus to the desktop sounds like a supremely unpalatable idea. It's much easier and much more reliable to move data over the network than it is to move water around in a computer.