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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.'"

2 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why? by diamondsw · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  2. Re:In my last house... by Znork · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.