HDD cooler/silencing

moparchris · Post by **moparchris** » Wed Jun 09, 2004 8:30 pm

hey, i thaught id post this up here, just show ya how i did it..

firsatly (this probly dosnt apply here

) but alot of people think its stupid and a waste of time to bother doing this to cool your hard drives, i did it so that i could insulate my drives and try to sound proof them a little.

ok its pretty basic but.. (sorry for the bad quality of the photos)

i made 2 of them, one for each drive..

thats just the pipes and basically how it will fit togeather where the 'L' joints are the tubes are just cut at 45 degree angles

all joints are made by brazing them, it could be soldered but id prefer brazed joints (id use ezy-flow or silfos rods but i used something i already had which im not exactly sure what was but anyway..)

layed out in the case it will be going in:

the case is actually just an old CD drive with all the insides taken out (obviously ill have 2 of these) it will have some sound proofing foam put in them which i dont have yet

just after putting it togeather without the end 'L' bit so that i could lap them before finishing it off:

pretty messy, needs quite a bit of lapping (ya cant really see from the pic but the surface is quite uneven

these pictures are pretty bad (crappy light and crappy camera) but this is after i finished them up, they not exactly that clean looking (not that theykl ever be seen when theyre in the computer) but the surface that goes on the side of the drive is pretty smooth, dosnt look it in the pics though..

clamped to the old drive..

i installed them, unfortunatly no pics of this but you get the idea anyway, i just clamped on a bit of tube to the ends of the 'L's put some cheap 'sil-more' heatsink compound on the sides of them, screwed them onto my drives and put them in their cases with the sound proofing foam and clamped on my tubing

i have them running in parallel off my 3 barb CPU block

oh yeah results.. well i didnt rwally do any before/after testing and for some reason the hdd temperature read by various programs is the same but always off by somthing like 5 degrees C but.. before i had the coolers with the drives just mounted in the bays the temperature was said to be about 24-26 degrees C from just doing basic stuff like browsing the net and playing music etc. now its between 16-18 degrees C. the sound has gone down ALOT partly from being taken out from the drive bays (damn that vibration *shakes fist at drive bay*) and the humming noise from the discs just spinning has prettymuch gone unless i put my ears right next to the case so im pretty happy with it so far

i guess i have to say thanks to 'lolito_fr' at procooling mostly (http://forums.procooling.com/vbb/showth ... hlight=hdd), i already had the idea but he showed that it would work good enough to cool a HDD, and yeah.. the rest of the ppl at procooling and here

{edit} -- ok.. i just shoved a thermomiter in each of them, just so it was sitting on top of the drive, it measured about 24.5-25 degrees C in both the room temp is 20 degrees C and water temp is about 22c in the res. note that these temps arent comparable to the ones i said before because they were from the SMART crap which is WAY off

ecto · Post by **ecto** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 6:41 am

Nice idea.. first time I've seen watercooling applied to the sides of a HDD, strangely enough. It's pretty obvious that the sides are hottar than the top of a HDD, one can only guess why so many people have watercooled the top of their drives instead of the sides

ravton · Post by **ravton** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 12:10 pm

ecto wrote:Nice idea.. first time I've seen watercooling applied to the sides of a HDD, strangely enough. It's pretty obvious that the sides are hottar than the top of a HDD, one can only guess why so many people have watercooled the top of their drives instead of the sides

As someone who has watercooled HDD's for a while, make sure that there is adequate cooling for the bottom of the drive. When really working this is what often gets above 50C-60C.

ecto · Post by **ecto** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 1:41 pm

Since it's practically impossible to cool the bottom with a waterblock, I doubt it's really necessary to have a fan cool the bottom of the drive when already watercooling the sides.

Or am I completely wrong? Seems useless with watercooling a HDD if you still need to cool the bottom with a fan..

ravton · Post by **ravton** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 6:11 pm

ecto wrote:Since it's practically impossible to cool the bottom with a waterblock, I doubt it's really necessary to have a fan cool the bottom of the drive when already watercooling the sides.

Or am I completely wrong? Seems useless with watercooling a HDD if you still need to cool the bottom with a fan..

Who said a fan? Boo Hiss! Fans are evil...

There are lots of products to help out (including waterblocks) but there are cheap ways too. For ghetto, think U-Channel, Right-Angles, or just run the piping on the bottom of the drive (with appropriate plate).

moparchris · Post by **moparchris** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 8:21 pm

ecto wrote:Nice idea.. first time I've seen watercooling applied to the sides of a HDD, strangely enough. It's pretty obvious that the sides are hottar than the top of a HDD, one can only guess why so many people have watercooled the top of their drives instead of the sides

yeah.. well when you mount your drive in a bay it has the walls which absorb some heat off the drive, so it seemed sortof obvious also because the bottom of my drive dosnt have much surface area to attcha anything to and the top isnt exactly flat so i didnt wanna muck around with making something fit on there (theyre Maxtors)

also ive checked the drives recently and they dont get hot anywhere so its all good

ive only got 2 fans left in my computer

, gotta do something about the PSU and the GPU, ill sort out a GPU soon but not sure what ill do about the PSU, i could mod it but im not sure i want to just yet

anyway.. thanks guys

ecto · Post by **ecto** » Tue Jun 15, 2004 4:19 am

ravton, when you spoke about keeping the bottom temps down I assumed you were talking about hot chips on the HDD's PCB. It's not easy to attach any form of cooling device on a HDD chip without thermal epoxy.. and that's not very practical =)

As for the rest of the bottom (i.e. under the centre of the platters, where there's usually no PCB), I reckon that area won't be that hot if you cool the sides of the drive, as it's all one big piece of metal.

ravton · Post by **ravton** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 11:53 am

ecto wrote:ravton, when you spoke about keeping the bottom temps down I assumed you were talking about hot chips on the HDD's PCB. It's not easy to attach any form of cooling device on a HDD chip without thermal epoxy.. and that's not very practical =).

Thermal epoxy? What the heck are you talking about? You use any of the many thermal gap fillers out there. Koolance includes an excellent thermal gap filler with it's HDD blocks.

Try google.

moparchris · Post by **moparchris** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 5:46 pm

bit of a mess in there... i made the CPU (not that you can see it) and GPU blocks, i used the black tubing in some places because its moulded and conviniently fitted the paths i needed

if your wqondering what the thing on the back of my PSU is go http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=13931 there.

jinu117 · Post by **jinu117** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 7:33 pm

ecto wrote:Nice idea.. first time I've seen watercooling applied to the sides of a HDD, strangely enough. It's pretty obvious that the sides are hottar than the top of a HDD, one can only guess why so many people have watercooled the top of their drives instead of the sides

Innovatek used to (or still do) have them. I myself did exact same thing before. However, the case space became an issue rapidly after adding another inch hand half or so of width on drive and my setup having 2 5.25" bays occupied. It became pain to route the line, etc and eventually gave up...

If someone doesn't have much of welding inclination, you can do it using JB WELD or QuiKCopper thing readily available on hardware store. Great job

mpteach · Post by **mpteach** » Wed Jul 07, 2004 8:13 am

Does the soundproofing really reduce the noice of the HD? Especially with all that metal attached to it?Ive been considering silent watercooled enclusures for sometime.

EDITED

moparchris · Post by **moparchris** » Thu Jul 08, 2004 2:14 am

FAN ? BAH fans are evil

i only have 1 fan in my computer thats only on 5v. the sound proofing really helps with the HDD's (now just 1 HDD for me) i cant hear my drive at all anymore, its a samsung ahh SP1203N and even my old maxtor that used to whine heaps i couldnt hear when it was in my hdd enclosures

mpteach · Post by **mpteach** » Thu Jul 08, 2004 10:56 am

Could this be used to cool two drives if the a taller block of copper was solder to a 1/2 inc pipe?

Where can i get copper blocks and where can i get barbs from? I know where to get the copper tubing.

jinu117 · Post by **jinu117** » Thu Jul 08, 2004 3:37 pm

mpteach wrote:Could this be used to cool two drives if the a taller block of copper was solder to a 1/2 inc pipe?

Where can i get copper blocks and where can i get barbs from? I know where to get the copper tubing.

Yes. Copper block... not sure... you can grab hobbiest copper plate that are much easier to manipulate. (Hobby land or something... been a while since last time I R/C'd) The "soldering" can be done using JB Weld, etc as I mentioned. Single 1/2" ID line of copper tubing going around is good enough to actually cool past 2 HDD from the copper plate. (In fact if you are making it I recommend you do to save your future trouble, it also makes mounting hole for HDD easier to manipulate since copper is going through between HDDs. The only part I had problem was the nature of copper plate being soft, getting the proper pressure between the copper plate and mounted HDD. You might want to look at extra thin piece of copper in between with termal paste (something like arctic alumina to fill in.
Heh, I hope I didn't thread jack much from orginial poster... but felt chiming in as previous try out as well.

moparchris · Post by **moparchris** » Thu Jul 08, 2004 3:45 pm

http://forums.procooling.com/vbb/showth ... hlight=hdd
there used to be pics there (or are they just not working for me

), his was prettymuch the same as mine except the plates were bigger so it fitted 2 drives and it screwed straight to a 5 1/4" bay

mpteach · Post by **mpteach** » Thu Jul 08, 2004 5:29 pm

What thickness of copper sheet would you recomend?

Im going to buy copper sheet, brass barbs, clearflex 60(pvc chemical) tubing and sorbothane from mcmasters.com. The copper pipe should be sold at home improvement stores near my house.

EDITED