Thought I'd covered that with my mention of DVD, Printer etc in my previous posting, but yes these things make a noise, however it's a different type of noise in that it's not the continuous same pitch wine of a fan or noisy HDD, and only occurs when you use the item. Normally I will install what I need from any optical medium to HDD then use a hack to bypass the requirement of having to have the CD in the drive if need be.

If someone ever makes a silent CD/DVD I'll be first in the queue same goes for printer scanner and all other noise making peripherals ;)

I haven't checked with Seagate yet,
 

But until I do, and unless they say otherwise, I am going to stick with top/bottom cooling, not side cooling.

I don't buy the 'side as heatsink to the case' argument, as I've NEVER seen any mention of this by drive makers, even when they talk about the need to ensure adequate cooling air flow. (over the top and bottom of the drive BTW) I know that if I were a drive engineer, I certainly wouldn't want to bet on the case as a heat sink, since I would have NO control over what kind of case or cooling that would provide - Some cases are plastic. Some cases use rails rather than solid mounts (including some plastic rails!). Some users rubber mount their drives in an effort to reduce noise (anybody we know??? :D ) Even in the best case of a solid mount to a steel drive cage, it's still pretty wimpy as a heat sink. Given an environment over which I would have so little control, I would plan on some other cooling path and take anything that comes from the sides as a bonus.

For myself, given current discussion, I'm inclining towards the notion of multiple top / bottom plate coolers in a 'sandwich' configuration, to cool things down with a foam wrap around the entire HD bundle for noise suppression. I will be using the new 10 and 15K rpm U160 SCSI Seagate Cheetahs, and everything I've read about them says they are noisy and hot, but that the speed is worth it :cool:

As a side note, I did a bit of work on my old dinosaur PC last night, I added a second 4GB HD (doubled my drive space) and did a bit of silencing. I removed the sheet metal grill from the PSU fan, which helped a little bit. The big change was to cut an old mouse pad (one of the cloth covered rubber ones) into strips and jam a strip inbetween each side of the hard drives and the (slightly bent) drive cage. I also had to replace the drive screws with ones that were slightly longer. I was going to screw through the mouse pad strips, but found that didn't really work because of the difficulty of getting the holes to line up, I was afraid that I'd bang the drives up to much if I kept trying so I just let it go by getting enough of the strip in place that I had no metal - metal contact other than the screws. The result is far from silent, but even with two hard drives instead of one, it's still quieter than it was.:D

Gooserider

PS, Bladerunner, did you get the PM I sent you the other day about the problem I was having with your website? If you didn't let me know and I can try to do a resend.

Although I'm sure if someone did a test comparing side vs top/bottom cooling the sides would win for the simple reason that the drive has an Al chassis so the whole thing is a kind of heat sink. So if you cooled the sides you would cool the drive. You'd also be cooling it via conduction which is by far the best.

Cooling by the top the heat has to travle through either some kind of sealent or air then through a thin sheet of Al or steel this is far less efficent. The top and bottom are also normally much more uneven than the sides normally.

However if you take into account a HD puts out less than 20w of heat than you don't need the best solution in the situation. So in reality it probobly doesn't matter for a 7200 rpm drive. I'm as of yet unsure how I'm going to cool my HDs. It will depend on A) cost of materials, B) how I want to position my drives.

What sevisehda says is most likely true, but what is being missed is that HDD heat, (at least the HDD's I've had), its more a heat soak over time issue, not a direct heat that needs to be sinked away like a chip. Most HDD's will be cooled effectively just using a fan blowing directly on them, If like me you don't want fans they can get overly hot over time with no airflow. A waterblock will work pretty well whether top or side mounted, and If as I said you want to avoid the vibration noise you won't be hard mounting them so the top cooling block could have side plates to retain, which was my original intention. I think Top cooling is preferred mainly because its more economical in that two drives can be cooled with one simple block, even if it is a little less effecient


Gooserider

Sorry M8 but I do get a shit load of e-mail and have to work through it when I can , Thanks for the bug report, but I can't find anything wrong? Are you still getting problems as I didn't totally understand your mail as there are no "next page buttons" anyhow it seems to work fine my end so if you are still getting issue what browser are you using?

I don't have solid data to back it up, but I still think the top is better, though it probably doesn't make much difference. :rolleyes:
Most of the drives I've dealt with had a really flat cover (I agree the controller side is irregular), and while some have had smooth sides, several have had bosses that the drive mounting screws went into, but otherwise were recessed. A drive like that wouldn't have much more direct contact area than a CPU.

The cover is normally Al, and is thinner so as to offer less conduction resistance. The primary heat produced by a drive is supposed to be air friction on the spinning platters, so IMHO the most effective cooling tactic would be to chill the largest single flat surface that contacts the air. You could almost think of it as a backwards CPU - hot air hitting the Al top cooler, dumping it's heat which is then carried away by the copper block.

However I think Bladerunner has the right idea in that it doesn't matter all that much which area you cool.

No prob, just didn't know if it had gotten lost in the shuffle or not.
I tried it just before starting this reply, and in the one case I tested, I'm still having the same problem. The work-around is a bit of a nusiance but isn't that bad, so normally I've just been using it rather than doing the problem sequence.
My mistake, I was working from memory and got that part wrong. Here is the sequence I used which produced the problem.
1. Start @ your home page. Click on 'Projects' page button (from left side menu)
2. Scroll down to Enermax PSU project, click on page 1 button.
3. Read page one, click on 'Page jump' "2" in the block at the end of the page.
4. End up on home page (NOT Page 2!)
Interestingly enough, the link shown in the browser window is "http://www.zerofanzone.co.uk/?request=liquidenermax550w&page=2"
which certainly seems to suggest the correct page, but I still got the home page.
OTOH, if I click on each page number in the block on the project page, I get the correct page. However I just noticed (funny what doing back to back tests will show you) that the link is different:
"http://www.zerofanzone.co.uk/projects.asp?request=liquidenermax550w&page=2"
I don't speak fluent URLish, but could this be the problem?
I run OPERA 6.03 (Linux, ad supported, version) on Linux RH 7.2 Usually I open lots of pages in seperate windows which is one of the reasons I love Opera so much.

Hope this is useful, If it is, buy me a beer some time :dome: (When I do commercial beer, I drink Guinness, though it's a tad on the light side :cool: )
ART

Gooserider

Thanks for the detail but try as I might I can't get any errors using IE, maybe it's an Opera or Linux thing, but I don't use either. I'll dirrect my webmaster to this topic to see if he has any ideas. Have you tried Ctrl + F5 on those pages, (if it's the same function in Linux / opera), in case the cached page is overruling the newer updated one? probably not just an idea off the top of my head.

Worth noting I never get
"http://www.zerofanzone.co.uk/?request=liquidenermax550w&page=2"

Which ever way I access page 2 it always shows the correct page as
"http://www.zerofanzone.co.uk/projects.asp?request=liquidenermax550w&page=2"

I don't speak fluent URLish, either but trying to learn :shrug: ....... it all seems too much like school homework to me, and would much rather be designing / making new blocks :p

Another thing you could try, (again it may not make any difference), is going to the site with .com rather than .co.uk

www.zerofanzone.com

Still haven't checked w/ Seagate,
 

But I am carrying on with my top / bottom cooler design. I have finished my first one, which like BR's design is intentended to do two drives at once. Unlike BR's block however, mine is on the ugly side.

I made it by getting a hunk of 1/8"(3mm) copper plate and cutting it to approx the size of a hard drive, and then milling the edges to make plates that are exactly the size of a 3.5" drive (about 4" x 6", (101 x 120mm)) I then got some copper tubing 1/4" ID, 3/8" OD and made as long a cooling loop with it as I could readily bend.

This turned out to be sort of a flattened round 'W' shape. The tube starts at the side of one end, goes to the other, u-turns comes back down the middle to the first end, does a second u-turn, back to the far end, does a third u-turn and comes back to the first end and exits out the other side of the same end. (So there are 4 passes of tubing running the length of the block)
Thus both the connection points are on the same end of the block, one on each side. Depending on how I mount the block the plumbing will hook up on either the same end as the electricals, or the opposite end. The loop is just a little smaller than the blocks, so it sits about 1/8" in from the block edges. I haven't actually measured how much tube goes into the loop, but it looks like around 2 to 2.5 feet.

I took two of the plates that I had made earlier, and sandwiched the loop in between them. Between squeezing the sandwich in my vice, and judicious application of a BMFH (Big _____ ______ Hammer :D ) I was able to get 90-95% contact between the plates and the tube. I took things apart, polished all the bits up with a bit of emery cloth, coated everything with plumbers solder flux and put the sandwich back together. I fired up my propane blow torch, and was able to solder all three parts together with plumbers lead free solder. It doesn't look great, but it is all copper on the inside, and today I tested it to 90 PSI with no problems. Next step will be to try doing some flow tests to see how much restriction I end up with.

The block I made was two sided, for two drives, but I could also use an aluminum block on one side (so the solder wouldn't stick to it) and make single sided plates to do individual drives. Or I could make a super cooling sandwich with any number of drives using double side plates between each drive, with a single plate on top and bottom. I also have considerable flexibility in mounting - I can stack the drives and plates in a 3.5" bay, use a stock sled to mount in a 5.25" bay, or do a sound proofing foam bundle that I could also stack almost anywhere.

I did have some difficulties. My first effort at making the loop with a tubing bender came out really lopsided, and I couldn't get it to squish down enough to fit on the block. So I went back to the drawing board and got a big block of wood which I laid the loop out on, then routed out to make a template that I could force the tube into as I bent it. This worked better, but the tube tended to kink and distort as I bent it, and this led to needing the hammer to flatten it when I was done. It is useable but not as nice as I would like.

What I would like to do is create some better jig fixturing so that I could bend the tubing more uniformly, and assemble the blocks better. But I can't really justify the cost of doing this just for the few blocks I'll be making for myself. Anyone have some ideas about how many of these I could sell if I were to make them for others? And how much I could get for them? This isn't a 'For Sale' message, as I know such are reserved for the FS/FT forums, but more an inquiry as to how much interest I would get if I was to put some of these blocks up for sale there.

Gooserider

I don't see why there is any argument over top/bottom vs. sides...maybe it's because I run hotter disks than everybody else. :rolleyes:

As BladeRunner said, the heat generated from drives is not much, and is more of a 'heat soak' built up over time. Even though, it is still obvious that the sides are the ideal place to cool the drive.

1. Look at high-end, high-heat SCSI disks--they have fins BUILT INTO the aluminum chassis. Examples: the six-platter(!) IBM 36Z15s that I run. Or the Fujitsu MAM/MAN/MAP/MAS, Maxtor/Quantum Atlas XX, WD Raptor (SATA=SCSI lite), etc.
2. Also note that drive lids are made of STEEL, and sometimes is several layers thick, withouth TIMs. Not to mention, drive lids tend to be very smooth, with obviously no attempt made to increase surface area via fins or ripples.
3. What about the massive insulating PLASTIC STICKERS that are on top of the drives?

Obviously the engineers had no intentions to dissipate significant amounts of heat through the lid--they expected it to leave through the main aluminum chassis, which contacts both the spindle motor AND the heated gas inside the drive.
If heat was to be discharged through the lid, it would be aluminum, and the labels would be smaller or nonexistent, i.e. etched into the lid (or stencilled on like Quantum used to do). Also, there would be at least some attempt made to stamp little fins in to increase the surface area.

As far as the controller board goes, there is little sense in cooling it. They are almost always insulated from the main body of the drive by a nonconductive plastic sheet, and a think sheet of foam, except where a few screws attach them to the drive, and where control electrodes pass into the body. In the worst case, very few components on the board will generate enough heat to put themselves at a high temp. Most of those are spec'd to run at even higher temps. Of those that remain (probably none), they can be cooled with a tiny passive heatsink.


Kindly disregard:
1. Plexi cases. They are a very recent development, and are almost certainly NOT considered when drives are engineered. (especially SCSI drives, which usually end up in servers)
2. Drive rails. More common, but are most commonly used with high CFM fans in a server for hot-swap applications, so the entire drive gets airflow, and heat dissipation through the rails is not a concern. If you are thinking of the plastic rails in 5.25" bays, please remember that those are intended for optical/tape/front expansion, not hard drives. Also, nearly all 3.5"->5.25" bay-conversion kits for HDDs include a fan.

Like almost everything in the real world it's never as clear cut in every situation. Drive designs tend not to have any proper thought on cooling, as the makers don't see it as an issue. If it runs at 50C and lasts 5 years instead of 10 then so what....

The thing is they have to follow a size form factor, so I guess cooling fins at the top or bottom would be harder to incorporate in the design.

Things to remember, cooling the top will generally give you more surface area in contact with the block than the sides. Natural heat paths always favour rise, (upwards), but heat will tend to migrate to a cooler surface, assuming a reasonable thermal interface.

I have a Centrino laptop that runs pretty cool with the fan off, and in doing some disk ghosting of the 2.5" drives in my main PC I've been using another spare drive in the laptop. It's a faster drive but gets extremely hot in the laptop case. Just sitting a 1U P4 copper heat sink on the plastic case of the laptop above the HDD area helps soak away some of the heat. The copper 1U P4 sink gets quite warm and that's with an air gap, and at least 3mm of plastic to pass through.

Imo, better isn't always going to be the sides in every situation, it depends on many other factors, my Cuda IV's did tend to get hottest on the top plate, (probably due to heat rise more than anything else). I just can't see it matters where you cool HDD's as long as you cool enough of it's area, (excepting high performance SCSI HDD's may require a more specific design thought on cooling). I think it's much better to design it to fit your specific needs shape and size wise, while keeping in mind contact over a lager surface area should keep the complete drive at a lower even temp. Also important is that the design doesn't leak.......... that would kill your drive faster than any heat related issues :p

I put the primary cooling on the HDD motor surface on the bottom... seems to keep the drives just over room temp without a problem... I have one upside down ... then the block... then the top drive. :D

Here's a picture of the block... had to mill a slight recess in the edges to get it to sit down on the HDD motor area.

http://pages.sbcglobal.net/mmz_tl_01...s/Dscn0476.jpg

Nice work.


The debate stems from the whole purpose of water cooling an HDD: what's the point in doing it, if it isn't done right, given that the benefit is already marginal?

I think it's pretty clear that side water cooling, along with a small fan and heatsink(s) for top components, is the way to go. That's the conclusion I came to, when I came up with the design.

Maybe, but define "right", what I'm saying is you just cannot for every situation, or every HDD design. My drives in my system were getting hottest on top, mostly I guess because there is no forced airflow, and the fact heat rises. It's also debatable that the benifits are marginal, I've since seen 58C max without the waterblock when stressing two drives in a 30C ambient. This may not harm them, but is far too hot for my liking.

Well, given that an HDD will, most assuredly be attached by the side, to a large steel plate, IMO, it's more than likely that if the drive was designed to have any kind of cooling, beyond airflow, it would be through the sides. What's also obvious is that it's not a complete solution.

We've debated this often. I believe that the heat that comes from the spindle motor will be dissipated into the HDD case, leaving the electronics to be cooled by another mean. We've also mentionned that cooling the top side of an HDD wouldn't work nearly as well, to cool the spindle motor, because of everything "in between".

Side cooling sucks, and I wish there was a better way, because I'm not looking forward to making a new mount for the larger drive(s).

As for the temp differences, we could go on and on about how the temp is measured, but I just don't care to get into that debate, unless someone's got some really good insights into it.

Any HDD made since the mid-late 90s has an onboard temp sensor. You just need a program that can read the SMART data to read it.
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/.../en/smart.html is an online version, you can find various tools about the net to read it without using a net connection. Note, most don't work for drives on a raid controller, however the better one's do work on SCSI disks.

Further to the above I'm yet to find a program to reliably read both scsi and ide disk temps, so I'm going to write my own this weekend. :p

Butcher

That Seagate link is good.

Not sure they all come with internal monitoring though, a couple of Maxtors that I had from 2000 / 2001 weren't supported as are quite a few according to this list.

http://www.siguardian.com/products/h...ture/hdds.html

I'm sure most new ones today come with it. I suppose its of only overall guidance if you don't know where the diode is mounted, could be next to a hot running IC :shrug:


bigben2k

I understand what you are saying there will technically be an optimum way to cool a particular drive, what I saying from my experience is just a thin copper block with one drive underneath, one on top both just connected by contact through the lid label is enough to significantly reduce the running temps. I could probably make some elaborate and complex design to get the dive 5c cooler overall but it's really not required. Like said I had intended to fix the block to the drives with a copper side plate, and probably still will at some stage, but it's not an important requirement for cooling them

Mine also don't touch the metal case sides as this leads to vibration induced seek noise.

That list is definitely not definitive. It lists my IBM drive as not supporting monitoring, but I was able to monitor it with a tool from IBMs website (which sadly only runs in dos). The issue is there's 2 places in the SMART data that can contain temperature data, I'm guessing that tool only reads one of them and so claims not to support HDDs.

As for temp sensor placement, I have no idea, but it should be placed somewhere where it can reliably detect overheat as that's the point of having SMART on hdds at all. Most HDDs seem to list a temp of 65C on their internal sensor as maximum btw.

The most reliable IDE monitor I've seen so far is this tool: http://private.peterlink.ru/tochinov/DTemp/DTemp.zip
Sadly no SCSI though.

According to Hitachi, 50C is what they consider to be the nominal drive temp, and 65C is the final trigger point for overheating.
Interestingly enough, they figure that running a drive at 35C should extend its life 35-65% (so it can be obsolete even longer...). Overheating to 65C decreases it by about 22-33%.

Also, the document claims that they are measuring the base casting temperature.

Hitachi link

Well I have a program cobbled together. It reads both my scsi and IDE HDD temps, including the one that was listed as not supported on your link Bladerunner. ;)

I'll whack a GUI on it tomorrow and get it looking reasonable.

The current prog if anyone wants to test whether their drive has temp sensors.

Oh yeah, no win9x support for IDE disks atm (I'll sort that tm) and if you want SCSI disks to read you'll need an ASPI driver.

Seems latest MBM has HDD monitoring, so I'm just going to use that. ;)

Yeah that's what I've been using as its been a feature in MBM5 for well over a year now. Before that I used the HDD Temp Pro app, but it was flaky to say the least. I did ask the author of MBM a few questions about HDD Temp Pro program and polling, (I'm sure I wasn't the only one), and a little while later he made HDD temp monitoring an included feature. He also included the Asus smart Doctor GPU & Ram temps as well which was great when I ran Asus 3D cards because my temps were reported in MBM. Here's an old screenshot when I had all temps reported.

http://www.zerofanzone.co.uk/pictures/gif/mbm5.gif

Not sure if MBM supports the latest Asus cards based on ATI's Chipsets?. One thing I had to do to get the SMART HDD temp reporting working with Abit NF7-S r2.0 was ditch the Nvidia IDE controller that was default installed with the nforce driver package. It works fine using the default windows controller.... current HDD temp 22C :)

^22c!!! :o :o


I guess that's why you should watercool your hdd's? My antec case has an 80mm fan in front of the hdd's, and temps still reach 38-40c. I like your design bigben, it looks like a clean, professional style design, that would perform well.

Also, can anyone tell me what i could expect performancewise from the copper tube/plate design on pages 2-3? Just wondering, because I can make one like that, and it doesn't seem restrictive to flow.

Thanks.

Volenti's solution is a really good one, because it doesn't interfere with the drive cage. The only drawback is the thermal resistance of the steel, which is going to reduce performance a bit, but hey, it's a hard drive, not a CPU. I'd still expect temps to be in the twenties though.

I don't think my block on top cooling is that efficient.... some explanation required..

You need to take that figure I got in the context of my particular system, that is completely fanless with coolant at about 14c to 16C when that screen shot was taken in 2002. 22C Hdd temp is nice but anything under 40C all thats' required really. To me it's 45C and over that's unacceptable...

I'm not using the underground tank cooling now due to a house move but still have 16C coolant atm.

http://www.zerofanzone.co.uk/picture..._dashboard.gif

This is using a large tractor Rad & fan (at 4v) remoted along with the pump, in the much cooler loft space of my house. This allows a silent PC environment but of course is only a winter solution....... in the spring I'll be doing a new underground system. :dome:

Did you leave the pipes in the wall? Would be interesting to see the looks on the faces of the new homeowners if they happened to be doing remodeling :D

There's a lot of theory about the best place to watercool a Hard drive, but no real data. While I was in the process of making an HD block, I discovered that a friend had an IR thermometer buried in a tool box, and I asked for it. :D

http://www.watercooling.cl/imagenes/hddtemp2.jpg

This is a must have toy for chasing hot spots! :drool:
(Metal surfaces don't work, need to be painted or covered with tape.)


I wrote an article about this in my friend's page, You can read it here

If don't understand the languaje, just see the pics, are self explanatory. :p

Yes I got one too, mine was very cheap, as in FREE :p we use them at work and one somehow ended up at my house :eek: To be honest they are not expensive and although a lot of people say they are not very accurate I've found them pretty good in my testing. Not very happy if I point it at shiny copper tho ;)

was super usefull in finding hot spots in my PSU

=========================================

no pipes in the wall.... but the bomb is still in the ground, probably think it's a unexploded WW2 bomb if they ever dig it up :D

The temperature differences between those measure points were pretty much what I had gathered on numerous forums about this very same subject. However it is always great to have evidence, great job nicozeg!

IMO cooling the base of the HDD is waste of time because even the hottest spot is only 1.4C hotter than the sides, not worth the extra effort required to construct a fitting waterblock there.

So: If you're planning to keep the HDD's in the 3.5" rack, then I would go for the top cooling as it can fit the rack and is also more than efficient enough to cool down the HDD and if you're using 5.25" spots or making a sound dampening box for the HDD, I'd go for side cooling as then the required space isn't an issue.

$.2

Nice work Nico!

This demonstrates what I've been talking about.

The backside cover doesn't touch the spindle motor (air gap), and that's where the heat comes from, so cooling the cover isn't going to do much. It's pretty obvious from the pics that water cooling the spindle motor directly is going to be pretty inconvenient, hence my decision to just cool the sides, and stick a few miniature heatsinks to cool any hot electronics, with the help of a small fan.


BTW, I picked up this neat tapping tool yesterday: it's a screwdriver, capable of tapping three size holes: 6-32, 8-32 and 10-32. Check out "Klein tools" for more details.

Remember that this is valid in a seagate barracuda, some drives have the cover screwed to the motor.

About the electronics: The smaller square chip was at more than 60ºC, but seems it works happy at that temp. :p