the case for HDD water blocks?

[industry7]

from what i've been reading it seems that everyone *hates* HDD water blocks. it seems like whenever someone brings one up, the standard reply is "they're useless unless you want a brick wall in your flow" which is then normally followed up by a "you'd do better putting some 120mm fans on them"

i'm in the middle of trying to design my cooling system and have been trying to research water cooling b/c it seems like it would would best implement the philosophy behind my new computer. one, I want a compact system. in this area i can see room for debate. water lines may have a tough time winding through a small system, but on the other hand, airflow is going to be a nightmare too. two, i want good performance. even though i'm not really planning on OCing, i still want to maintain a cool working envirnment for my components as well as a low ambient case tempurature. finally, and i think this is where water is going to be right for me, i want a very quiet system. i've been hearing a lot of people saying that you can't beat water for perforamce/noise ratio, which is exactly what i'm looking for.

now that i've gone completely off topic, i'll bring it back. i'm planning on putting 2x 36gig raptors in raid 0. i've heard these things run really hot, so immediately my first response is "can i put water blocks on them?" but everyone seems so dead set against that. i heard it might restrict flow, which prompts me to ask, what about running "low flow" lines for the HDD (and possibly chipset as well, since i've heard they really don't need high performance water) parallel to the main lines. it seems like that would solve both problems by not restricting flow to the cpu and gpu while still providing a quieter more effective cooling solution for the HDDs.

any thoughts?

 

[Nitro350Z]

Running parallel loops with one pump? I've heard that setting something like that up so that it functions well is a nighmare.

might be a good idea to get either a seperate loop with a silent small pump and the main loop cooling the CPU/GPU with a stronger pump or just setup the loop for the CPU/GPU and then have 1 silent 120mm fan blowing over both hd's

it probly wouldnt need to be a very strong fan, possibly even the low 20 CFM fans would be good enough to cool the hd's

Good luck.

 

[waylander]

I have to say that if you use water cooling on the cpu and gpu, which are the two greatest contributors to heat, you'll drop the temperature inside the case significantly. This temperature drop will impact everything by letting them run in a cooler environment, a 120mm fan should be sufficient at this point to cool the hdds.

BUT, if you want to w/c the hdds then I would suggest a completely separate system, different pump, different lines and radiator but you can share the reservoir if you get one with 2 input 2 output. You could use a smaller pump like the swiftech micro and 1/4" lines as the hdd's will restrict flow from anything larger anyway. This will not be compact though, you will need at least a mid size case and probably a full size one if you do a custom system with 1/2" tubing for the cpu/gpu. Plus you need to find somewhere to put 2 radiators.

 

[shawnlizzle =]]

what do you mean by "low flow lines" if its running the loops in parallel, then forget it, you'll also lose flow in your cpu and gpu loop, which will affect performance dramatically.

even though you already know that HDs are more than sufficiently cooled w/ a fan, you still insist on watercooling. water does give a lot of performance at a low noise level - as long as it cools only the cpu and gpu.

hard drives don't speed up when you cool them do, nor do they perform better at a relatively low temperature. the need to cool down the hard drives is just not there.

second of all, the noise from the watercooling system is mostly from the fans and the pump, so adding another fan for the HDs really won't add much to the noise level (quiet fan will do just fine)

 

[industry7]

what i meant by "low flow lines" is smaller ID. theoretically if i took a 3/8" line (main line for cpu/gpu) and a 1/4" line (supplemental line for HDD/chipset, as suggested) and ran them parallel, then approximately 2/3 of the water would run through the larger line, and 1/3 through the smaller. so for example, using Switech's MCP655, the cpu would get about 200ghp, and the HDD 100gph. i do'nt know if that would really be enough for the cpu, but i would guess so since Swiftech's other popular pump only makes about 100gph.

on the other hand, i like the idea of using two seperate systems. even though i'm trying to put this in a compact system, it might still be possible b/c i've been looking at the external kits that just get slapped on top of your case and i'm thinking maybe i'll make something like that myself. it'd effectively make the case a little bigger, but i think it'd add to the look as well.

now i know that HDDs don't speed up when you cool them, or perform any better at low temp, but i'm not doing *ANY* of this water cooling for performance reasons. i'll probably be doing little overclocking if any at all. like i said before i want to build a compact system which is probably goign to have horrible airflow issues, and i want my system to run cool. the main reason i was looking at HDD blocks at all is that i heard raptors run hot, and i know for a fact that heat has a direct impact on HDD life. on the other hand, i just read a post by someone comparing his 74gig raptor to his other HDD (which runs at 7.2K) saying it's really not any hotter. but i'd probably worry about any HDD staying cool in a small case.

if i don't go with water, then i'd want to go with ducted fan. the problem with that though is space. ducts eat up a lot of room. i like ducted fan though b/c it gets a lot more cool outside air to where you need it. when i did it to a friend's system, it made an apprecable difference (several degrees for a system that already ran cool). but then i've got lots of loud fans, which i'm really sick of fans.

on the other hand, water is a big investment and the more i look at it the more expensive it seems. so i'm gonna look at air a little more. maybe fan technology has improved more than i thought.

 

[waylander]

Fans have become better and some air solutions actually out perform the worst water cooling kits.

I think one of the most important aspects of a small form factor case is cable management. Look into a modular psu so that you can get rid of unwanted power cables. Get rounded ide cables for optical drives. Although sleeving power cables doesn't improve airflow that much it can make the inside look less cluttered with one solid color as opposed to 6 different ones. Route as many cables as possible behind the motherboard tray, just take off the right side of the case to do this.

The other important aspect is obviously airflow. A case with an extra side intake and top exhaust are great, they get rid of the "dead" zones where air tends to just sit around and get hot.

 

[phreejak]

I've two pumps in my watercooling system - 2 Swiftech MCP655's. They power two parallel loops - one which cools the peltier on my CPU and the other which uses a Danger Den NV78 on my 7900 GTX, a northbridge waterblock and a Danger Den HDD waterblock (which, coincidently, cools 2 Raptor 36's in a raid 0). Each loop also has it's own dual 120 rad cooled by 4 120mm fans (Panflo) and they only converge at the reservoir.

 

[weekendwarrior]

"]hard drives don't speed up when you cool them do, nor do they perform better at a relatively low temperature. the need to cool down the hard drives is just not there.

Hard drives without enough airflow will heat up, will affect your performance in a negative fashion, and can cause them to overheat and crash. Even if the crash is only for the amount of time it takes to cool the drive off, in a RAID 0, your array will be toast.

I run 7200 rpm SATA drives. 6 of them. If I don't cool them, they get hot enough to blister and take themselves offline. I'm looking to watercool mine, as well, though none of the blocks on the market will fit in the available space.

 

[Fence82246]

Old thread up above...but it seems heat and HDD failure have little to do with each other...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/129420-1/article.html?tk=xlr8yourmac

http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0geu96aZ9pJCIEA6_tXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTBybnZlZnRlBHNlYwNzcgRwb3MDMQRjb2xvA2FjMgR2dGlkAw--/SIG=1235sa91j/EXP=1239136538/**http%3a//labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

OR (Same thing...one is HTML the other PDF)

http://74.6.239.67/search/cache?ei=UTF-
8&p=Google+Paper+on+Harddrives&fr=slv8-iobit&u=labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf&w=google+paper+papers+harddrives+%22hard+drives%22&d=AtmjrZ2uShos&icp=1&.intl=us

 

[Shadow703793]

^Please don't awaken dead threads.

 

[rubix_1011]

Yes, please...leave the corpses to rest. For the record...no HDD water blocks...just sit a good fan in your HDD cage and you will be just fine.