Hello!
I plan to totally enclose HDD and watercool it, but the question is: do I need to cool the circuitry, or is it enough just to attach water block into metallic parts of the cover?
I am going to use Zalman GWB1 nVidia block as I have one such laying around. It offers minimal flow resistance and as it's effective enough for mid-range nVidias, it should be enough for HDD, too (60W vs. 25W). Also by my experience the HDD cover warms up quite evenly, which would indicate that just attaching waterblock with thermal adhesive to some part of the cover would be enough to keep the disk cool. I also suspect that motor heat gets transferred into HDD casing.
But the circuitry, do you guys have any idea about it?
Hard drive cooling
Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee
Just cool the sides of the HD drive, where most of the heat goes. Otherwise you will just be cooling the temp sensor and mistakenly think that you lowered temps when all you really did is cool the sensor. Don't worry about the top and bottom of the HD drive.
Watercooling HDD is really cool because it allows you to do very heavy muffling which if done right can be extremely effective. On the other hand, another option is to get a notebook drive which stays cool and can be muffled without any cooling.
Watercooling HDD is really cool because it allows you to do very heavy muffling which if done right can be extremely effective. On the other hand, another option is to get a notebook drive which stays cool and can be muffled without any cooling.
I'd suggest getting a dedicated drive cooler. These will have much better area coverage than a GPU cooler. I'm not sure a hard drive will heatsink itself efficiently enough if you just cool one GPU sized spot on it. GPU, CPU and Chipset coolers are designed to dissipate a lot of heat from a concentrated area and they can do this well, if the heat is concentrated. A hard drive isn't going to do that for you though. To cool it properly you will have to cool a significant proportion of the exposed metal and that requires an hd cooler. I know Koolance makes them but I'm sure there are others available too.
Ok, thanks for the tips :-).
The reason why I thought about using the GPU block is that I have it already and HDD water blocks tend to be either expensive or hard to come by here in Finland, or both.
But have to rethink the idea. One option might be to get some thick alumium sheet, have it cover the HDD and then attach GPU block to it - alumium should transfer the heat pretty evenly.
I also plan to add temperature sensor or two to places that might overheat, so I will not rely just to the HDD internal one.
The reason why I thought about using the GPU block is that I have it already and HDD water blocks tend to be either expensive or hard to come by here in Finland, or both.
But have to rethink the idea. One option might be to get some thick alumium sheet, have it cover the HDD and then attach GPU block to it - alumium should transfer the heat pretty evenly.
I also plan to add temperature sensor or two to places that might overheat, so I will not rely just to the HDD internal one.
You can also usually get it from HDD SMART info; on Linux side program named smartctl can show it, on Windows side there certainly is a number of programs to do it but I cannot name any.shoebox9 wrote:H/drives have internal temp sensors? How can we access the info?
Keeping eye on SMART info is a good idea for other reasons, too, since you can sometimes predict drive failure before it's too late.