I've been gone for a while, but have been giving this project a lot of thought and am still planning on pursuing it. I appreciate all of the advice so far and welcome more, but we seem to be stuck on a particular issue: I say I want a silent computer and am countered with how easy it would be to make a quiet computer. We're not on the same topic when we do that and a rational discussion is impossible. The presence of a single fan is too much and too loud. One of my computers is an old P-2 with a single quiet 120mm fan plus the PSU and it was too loud. So I built a wooden enclosure for it and it was quieter, but still too loud. Now I have a resistor wired between the mobo and fan to lower the RPM's and it's quieter yet, but still too loud. So a two fan system with a custom made box at low RPM's is too loud for my application. Now, granted, I can still hear the hdd's in this system over the fans at times. And this is what originally got me thinking of watercooling--I wanted a way to cool the hard drives while being able to seal them in something as close to soundproof as I can design. Then the idea expanded to include total watercooling with a large passive radiator and fanless PSU's, then I stumbled upon submersion cooling and here I am.
It certainly appears that dunking the hard drives would be a bad idea and I have decided against this. I'm thinking of picking up 4 of
http://www.koolance.com/shop/product...roducts_id=231these to cool the 8 drives and then sealing them behind mdf/insulating foam/whatever to silence them.
From there things get a bit fuzzy... I'm envisioning a small custom fish tank that is only big enough to house the mobo/pci cards and a submerged pump or two (and possible a PSU--need help here). The mobo would be mounted vertically and the top of the tank would be plexiglass. I could use a dremel to cut out the plexi to exactly fit the mobo and cards and probably even seal the two with silicon or something. With the exception of the cables (sata, maybe even power if the PSU is in there) this will create a sealed system. I would love some suggestions on how to get the cables out too.
I would like to use an eheim 1046 (maybe two) because it seems to be considered the quietest pump and can be submerged which I thought would further quiet it. I'm not sure if only 1 could be used for the 4 hard drive cooling blocks and a large radiator or if I'd need 1 for the hard drives and another for just the radiator. These lines would also enter and exit through the top plexi.
Here are my two biggest hangups right now and both seem to depend on the other. My original idea was to get 2 Antec Phantom 350's and just split the load (run them in parallel). However, if one were to fail I would lose half the RAID array and that would be disastrous. It seems to make more sense to use one large PSU to power everything, however, these all have fans. Now I'm considering sticking the fanned PSU in the Fluorinert but that would be adding a whole lot more heat to my system, require the use of a larger radiator which in turn would require a lot more Fluorinert to fill it and that's just a lot of money (It seems I can get the Fluorinert for $200-250/gallon and I would really like to stay in the 2-3 gallon range for the whole system) I would love some help in this area. I'm also looking at radiators outside of the computer or automotive arenas as they seem too small for passive cooling. I'm not sure exactly how big of a radiator I need though because I don't know how much heat it is that I'm going to be dissipating.
I hope I didn't offend anyone with my opening paragraph. I'll agree with you, this is not practical. It's a hobby and a projectand something challenging I've never done before. A lot of the impetus is to just see if it can be done, and if it's done well, I will be thrilled. Any suggestions are very much appreciated.