Cooling an opend hard drive inside an acrylik box ¬_¬ yup...

[noahscorp]

Hello everyone 😀
This is going to be a fun post so here goes:

My big plan is to have an acrylik box to house my 6 HDD's
The idea of it being a box is that i will be opening the HDD's, wiring them all up, feeding the cables through a hole then sealing it all off.
So i have 6 HDD's in a box, all spinning and open which will look amazingly cool BUT, how the heck would i cool them?
A fan would be pointless as it would just push the warm air around, with no fresh air it wouldnt be able to cool them.
Another option would be to water cool them, but there aren't any HDD waterblocks available anywhere 🙁 And 6 would just get messy anyway.
The other option is to just not cool them, the acrylik box that they will be in will be at room temperature so again, would they need any type of cooling at all?
Thanks for all your time in replying and reading the post 😀
All the best

 

[noahscorp]

correction, there are waterblocks available, but im trying to make this case as quiet as i possably can, and 6 HDD's are fairly loud 😛 Hence the seperate acrylic box hehe.
So if i was to watercool them, would just mounting the radiator on the outside work with no fans?
I immagine radiators are efficient in cooling but how good are they?

 

[ulysses35]

Opening hard drives is bad idea if you mean what I think you intend to do is remove part of the outer casing from internal hard drives. This leaves the platers very exposed and one tiny piece of dust could trash the drive.

 

[lafontma]

Your drives will fail under 1 sec... No way you will get that container 100% particle free

 

[noahscorp]

indeed, i do understand the risk in doing this, if it doesnt work it will be a bummer but if it does, and for a long time, it'll be well worth it. And then something others can do for themselves

 

[lafontma]

Let's for 1 moment imagine those drives working..

1 HD will produce approx 25w-30w of heat to dissipate. So you are looking at less then 200w..

That can easily be handled by a water cooling loop with 6 blocks (1 per drive) and mounting pump, rad, etc outside the box.

But then again where will they attach to with no top casing

 

[noahscorp]

Yeah i know it will be easy to do they are just in bog standard drive bays with a fan poorly giving a little whisper of wind but, im trying to make this work with no noise at all.
A water cooled system needs a fan on the rad but i dont want one 😛 if it's possible. If not then ill have to route it all into my main computer and have the rad in there which would be a bummer.

 

[lafontma]

Your acrylic box will heat up if you do not remove the heat generated by the drives.. Acrylic doesnt transfer heat very well so unless the box is HUGE the surface of the box wont be enough to allow the room temperature to cool it off

 

[noahscorp]

aah ok then, water cooling it'll have to be i guess, which will make this an expensive failure if it all dies haha

 

[lafontma]

Build an aluminium box 😀 That should work (heat wise) but you will loose the coolness factor... and buy a few cheap HD on ebay to play around with because the moment you open up the HD cover in a non sterile/dust free room, the platters will pickup dust that will scratch the surface

 

[noahscorp]

Indeed, and yeah i have a HDD that im going to play around with, but aluminium isnt the best for keeping sound in 😛
It'll be a 10mm thick acrylik, suppose it'll have to be water cooled ¬_¬ Unless i come up with some other wacky idea that might work. Perhaps senting water around the acrylick to cool it that way. Say on one side of the box theres a 2mm sheet of acrylik then a square piece of 6mm acrylick then another 2mm, drill 2 holes attach pipes and cool it that way. Much cheeper than 6 water blocks.