Hard Drive Blocks

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ryanstev

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Dec 9, 2004
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My hard drives, since moving to water cooling and removing my system fans get as high as 120 degrees at times and I've been thinking about water cooling them too.

Does anyone have experience with those Innovatek HD-O-Matic water blocks? The ones that go on each side of your hard disk and you put them in your 5 1/2 inch bay?
How well do they work?

I'm not interested in the blocks that fit on top of the HDs, because if you've ever opened a HD you'll know that there's nothing internal touching the top of them and all the heat comes out the sides.
 
you would do better simply to put a fan somewhere that gets some air flowing over the harddrives. It would perform nearly as well and would not give the added restriction to your system.
 
Its easier to just get a bay cooler or something with fans...BUT

If you, like me use water cooling for silence on top of everything else a watercooled HDD is not a bad idea.
But, I have no experience with them as they are quite expensive and I would rather just use some kind of passive cooling heatpipe holder.
Zalman makes one, I have been using it for some time and it seems to do a good enough job, not super cool but enough when there are no fans. It also doubles using noise canceling rubber mounts to keep that SOB hard drive quiet. Up to you:)

http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/drives/6d08/

Anywho, just another option.

Ed
 
A 5Ved 80mm fan will do better than watercooling where it counts (the chips on the bottom) and doesn't make enough noise to be noticed.
 
thewhiteguy said:
A 5Ved 80mm fan will do better than watercooling where it counts (the chips on the bottom) and doesn't make enough noise to be noticed.
Click to expand...

not with the HD blocks that use a thermal interface material such as the asetek (a deformable pad) and koolance (2 part thermal goop)

ryanstev said:
........I'm not interested in the blocks that fit on top of the HDs, because if you've ever opened a HD you'll know that there's nothing internal touching the top of them and all the heat comes out the sides.
Click to expand...

and you don't cool the "top" of the HD, you cool the bottom where the chips and spindle is....... I did a write up for WC HD for silence, see the pics, you'll get the idea.....

WC HD write up


thewhiteguy: just about every post I see from you in the water cooling section is negative in some way. "don't wc your PSU, that's lame, don't wc your HD, don't, blah blah blah.

just wondering if you have ever contributed rather than detracted from the "I want to WC my....." threads :rolleyes:
 
topcat989 said:
not with the HD blocks that use a thermal interface material such as the asetek (a deformable pad) and koolance (2 part thermal goop)
Click to expand...
Who would put goop all over their hard drive?
 
topcat989 said:
thewhiteguy: just about every post I see from you in the water cooling section is negative in some way. "don't wc your PSU, that's lame, don't wc your HD, don't, blah blah blah.

just wondering if you have ever contributed rather than detracted from the "I want to WC my....." threads :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
I'm one of the voices of practicality around here. Just because something can be done doesn't mean that it should or that it would yield any benefit. If you want to see what I've contributed, check out my watercooling thread. That's a great example for people to use when building their own external radiator setups.
 
I have never seen a hard drive die due to heat reasons. Drives in laptops are encased in plastic and have no airflow over them, but they are okay. I have 4 250gb hard drives stacked on top of eachother in my case with only a 7v 120mm fan on them and they never get hot.

Watercooling is overkill in this situation, hard drives just dont have the thermal density to justify anything over than convection cooling.
 
The problem is my hard drive bracket is directly underneath my 5 1/4 inch bays, so there's no room to put a fan on them from the front, if I tried from the back the ribbons would be in the way and wouldn't work either.

The water blocks are pretty expensive, $NZ65 and I'd need two of them, so I'll have a look at some 5 1/4 inch bay mounting brackets and use one of my fans in there.


Thanks for the comments guys.
 
killernoodle said:
I have never seen a hard drive die due to heat reasons. Drives in laptops are encased in plastic and have no airflow over them, but they are okay. I have 4 250gb hard drives stacked on top of eachother in my case with only a 7v 120mm fan on them and they never get hot.

Watercooling is overkill in this situation, hard drives just dont have the thermal density to justify anything over than convection cooling.
Click to expand...

If someone has 0 airflow in their case, then cooling the hard drives becomes an issue. Damage can and will occur if a Hard drive gets hot enough, especially the motor....its not a myth. Maybe watercooling isn't needed but some kind of cooling is needed if there is 0 airflow in the case....even minimal airflow should be fine.

ryanstev said:
The problem is my hard drive bracket is directly underneath my 5 1/4 inch bays, so there's no room to put a fan on them from the front, if I tried from the back the ribbons would be in the way and wouldn't work either.

The water blocks are pretty expensive, $NZ65 and I'd need two of them, so I'll have a look at some 5 1/4 inch bay mounting brackets and use one of my fans in there.


Thanks for the comments guys.
Click to expand...

There are a few HDD waterblocks at can attach to 2 Hard drives at once...I think koolance is one of them. This way you can just buy the one. I don't have any experience with any of these but I did see a few of those around.
 
Is that right?

How many hard drives have been fried due to heat? Does it degrade their performance? What exactly does heat do to the drive? Last time I heard motors are not affected much by heat until they are rediculously hot, which reallly never happens in a hard drive.

Without numbers and evidence you do not have a case.
 
Do you think hard drive manufacturers list a range acceptable operating temperatures just for fun? If you think it's okay to run a drive really hot, then do so and tell us how it works. You're the one making the extraordinary claims, you killernoode need to provide the appropriate proof.

By the way, there's more to a hard drive than just the motor. Ever noticed that a too-hot-CPU will make errors? How about a drive's controller? Its buffer memory? Or are they magically protected by your disbelief in heat problems?

And how about them heads, you know the one that float mere microns about the disk surface on a cushion of air? What happens to that carefully balanced airfoil when the air is less dense and less viscous due to excess heat?
 
WD states that the 74g Raptor (the hottest HDD around arguably) has an operational max temp of 55c... how many hard drives have you seen can actually reach this temperature? (unless they are enclosed in a plastic box in an already rediculously hot case for a long period of time)

I have yet to feel a hard drive that was hot to the touch (nothing close to 131F).

EDIT: according to WD, the 74g raptor only consumes 8.4 watts during load :rolleyes:
 
noodle, there is no need to prove myself.

In any case I won't let this thread which was meant to help a fellow member solve his HDD cooling problems turn into some right and wrong stupid fight that always happens when someone goes off like this.

I came, tried to help and explained it will be needed to cool the HDDs. Thats all.

Hope this thread helped ryanstev....
 
i'm not sure which programs/utilities you guys use to report your hard drive temps but i use a little linux-app called hddtemp
and with my Seagate Baracuda 200gyg without my hard-drive blocks under heavy read-write access it gets up to 42C and it idles at 37C
with the water blocks under heavy access it gets up to 35C and idles at 33C

i'm sure that this temperature difference makes practically NO difference on performance at all BUT i'm rather poor and that hard drive was quite an expenditure.. and i'm sure that this temperature difference makes a significant difference in Life Expectancy

also... the hard drive block i'm using feels like it is not very flow-restrictive at all.. so i dont mind adding it to the loop.. and i didnt notice much of a cpu temp increase after i added it...

the Block i use is a NoiseIsolator block:
http://www.noiseisolator.com/hd-wbk.html

hope that helps some
 
james.m.flood said:
........i'm sure that this temperature difference makes practically NO difference on performance at all BUT i'm rather poor and that hard drive was quite an expenditure.. and i'm sure that this temperature difference makes a significant difference in Life Expectancy.......
Click to expand...

you're right in that it doesn't help performance, but I believe it does help prolong the life of the drive, and depending on your HD block, it cuts down noise, which is my primary goal. Another thing to consider is all that heat from the HD are getting exausted from the inside of the case, making it cooler. (depends on how you have the rad setup. most have it so that it exuast to outside of case)
 
I'd like to add a little info about water cooling the hard drive...

recently i have added another identical 200 gyg seagate which is not water cooled and sits right beside (not touching) the cooled one..

and while most of the time, the water cooled drive is at Least 5C cooler then the non WC hard drive... there were a couple times, under heavy cpu load (compiling for a while) and relatively low hard drive action from either of them, the WC hard drive actually got Hotter then the non-WC hard drive... simply because the water temp ended up being around 37C and it warmed up the drive...

i'm sure that similar things happen to other components also, but this is easiest for me to monitor,

so in a way the extra hard drive blocks may at times be serving as heat sinks ;)

also, i have a steel case and where the hard drive blocks make contact with the case, the case gets a little warm too... but the rest of the case is almost always very cold to the touch, so that is probably acting as someone of a heat sink also ;-)

all in all i would go for it..
 
If you're looking for cheap HD blocks, you can't go wrong with the ones I have (check sig).

Now, I can't be bothered to goop up that much gap with thermal grease, so my temps are only about 5 degrees lower than they were when I had the drives sitting out on top of my case, side by side with space between them. Not much of a difference when you consider that this is on the same loop as my CPU and NB which are a good 20-30 degrees lower than they were on air at their current clock, but again, these aren't the flattest blocks, and hard disks don't have flat sides, and I don't bother with thermal goop. If I sanded both and gooped, I might be able to double the temp drop, but they're running in a closed case with no circulation at a temp that makes me happy.

For 30 bucks, give it a try. If you don't like the performance, try sanding both contact surfaces and using thermal goop. It won't damage either piece, just make sure you wet sand so no particles get into the drive bits (if you've never sanded before, look for a FAQ, it's more complicated than it sounds).

As for whether it's necessary or not, watercooling anything isn't necessary. Arguing that you don't need to watercool something is like arguing that nobody needs a car with 400 horsepower. Of course nobody does, but it's still cool to have it. Watercooling hard drives is less necessary than doing so for a CPU or even NB, but that's still akin to having 400 or 500 or 600 horsepower, it's just more madness, more cool.

If you don't want to do it, don't. If you aren't sure if it's necessary, it's not. If you want to do it for more performance only, it's not worth it. If you want to do it for looks or bragging rights, go for it. I wanted it for silence, and it's done very well at that.

The opponents of watercooling drives have a point, you can easily cool drives with air, but if you have a watercooling system with some headroom and you want more bling, or you are waging war against fans, I think it's worth 30 bucks to try this. Be warned, nobody makes hard drive blocks in anything larger than 3/8" ID tubing hose barbs, and my blocks even go down to 1/4" ID at the front interconnect, so you'll want to size replacement barbs that will still allow a drive to fit (there's not *much* space between an installed drive and the front barbs). I solved that problem by doing the drive blocks in parallel using 1/2 to 3/8" wyes (not easy to find, and less easy to fit tube over, but worth it in the end).
 
killernoodle said:
I have never seen a hard drive die due to heat reasons. Drives in laptops are encased in plastic and have no airflow over them, but they are okay.
Click to expand...


Yeah true, but if you leave the laptop on your lap, your nuts would die before the had drive. I don't mind cooling the hd with a fan, but water is overkill,
 
Regarding cooling laptop drives, until very recently laptops used 5400RPM or less drives. The difference in heat produced between a 5400 and 7200 rpm drive is significant. The platters and motor are spinning half again as fast at 7200 RPMs. At 10k and higher cooling becomes even more important. Also, the more drives you put in close proximity, the more heat. A shelf of drives for one of my netapp filers at work has a whole bank of fans built into it to pull air from front to back. Now the one or two drives in your rig won't kick out as much heat, but zero air moving across them is a guaranteed way to shorten the life of the drive and potentially corrupt data.

Bottom line, it's your data so your risk. Here's hoping this is just your hobby....
 
thewhiteguy said:
Your sig is too long. Why do people insist on putting newlines in their sigs? They shouldn't be allowed.
Click to expand...

My sig is long because I'm [H]ardcore about [H]ardware. It's a computer geek thing. Some do, some don't. Some do it to brag, some do it to show reference when they ask for help with their rig. I like to think it's a little of both. If you don't like it, you know how to turn it off, right? ;)

4b5eN+EE said:
if you want a cheap block xoxide is having a sale on the 8th-9th (today) with a $15 HDD block.
http://xoxide.com/ha.html
Click to expand...

Those are the ones I have, and damnit, now they're half price. Those are probably the best price you can find for HDD blocks, and you won't get noticeably-different performance out of any other ones that all cost $50. Like I said above, you might want to replace the fittings with larger ones and even sand the contact surface if you're really picky, neither is difficult to do though.
 
yeah, same block i have.. (the original manufacturer is NoiseIsolator, some taiwaneese company that doesn't shit directly here unless you order 1000+ items)

and the block has suprizingly low resistance
 
ignitionxvi said:
wtf, does it cool anything besides the SIDES of the hard drives?
Click to expand...
if you'd read the whole thread, i posted a DIRECT comparison to an uncooled drive,
and from what i said, one might conclude that YES it DOES cool the whole drive, or at least it cools where-ever Seagate sticks their temperature sensor (which i DOUBT is on the sides ;) )

it may also heat up the drives :)
 
How are you people measuring the HD temp?
With a self-installed thermal sensor? I've heard that HDs have an internal sensor, and comments from a couple of you would go along with that, but what do you use to get that data?

edit: P.S. I have a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 160GB SATA drive.
 
Let me clarify one detail, James.

"what do you use to get that data [in Windows]?"

:)
 
sorry for that then,
i should have said that it exists in windows to
http://www.softandco.com/a/9280/hdd-temperature.html
and it also has a pretty gui for all those command-line fearers...

uhm, i don't know how it performs, as i have never used it.. all i know is that the linux version kicks ass... and no, i'm not implying that you fear the command line! ;)

the linux version has an enourmous database of hard-drives that it works with.. i'm assuming windows version is similar
and for the record: I HATE windows :)
 
Well, okay then.
I forgot to come back and check this thread, and I found that program without even remembering what you said you used. This URL though: http://www.hddtemp.com/

I'm using it now, it says I'm at 31C.
I've got the Zalman ZM-2HC2, just installed today. I didn't check my temps before installing it, but I'm not worried about them. I really needed something like this to relocate my drive into the 5.25" bay in prep. for an internal up front double heatercore. It quieted the drive down quite a bit too, and I wasn't even bothered by the noise it made.

Thanks though James.

P.S. I'm an ex-Mac user, and I really don't mind Windows. :)
 
keep in mind if you are cooling the sides of the HD, you are cooling the whole HD. The sides are part of the body of the HD, one piece machined Al, so if you effectively cool the sides the HD should be OK. The only ecpection is if you WC and have NO airflow, some of the pcb chips may get hot.

Since my goal is silence and the HDs go into a foam filled enclosure, effective heat removal of all aspects of the drive is important to me, so I cool the sides and bottom, using gap filling thermal interface material where needed....
 
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