I've been trying to come up with a way to build my HDD into my watercooling loop when I rebuild my air box for water. By sifting through all the discussions about HDD watercooling around here, I've been able to determine several well-agreed upon points:
- HDDs don't put out a ton of heat, so watercooling is almost always overkill
- however, it can eliminate the need for a fan or two, makes the whole setup quieter, less dependant on airflow[, and is pretty cool]
- the two main sources of head in a HDD are the spindle motor and air friction/turbulance
- it doesn't matter too much where the block goes on the drive if you simply want to suck up excess heat
- a lot of people like putting blocks on the sides of drives to take advantage of the large, flat, & exposed surface area
I toyed with the copper-pipe-soldered-to-a-copper-fin idea, and decided that was kind of ghetto. I'm also not a great soldering artist, so my prototype turned out kind of ugly (junk HDD shown):
pic 1 pic 2
I also looked into the stereotypical design incorporating milled copper blocks screwed to the sides of the drive (like the Innovatek cooler or the one Ben designed in another thread). I would do this, but my access to the tools required to mill, seal, tap, and finish a block myself is pretty limited. I also couldn't think of a way to get the return loop around the front of the drive elegantly without adding tight corners. I also want to be able to cool any of the particularly hot ICs on the drive's circuit board that might experience problems in a zero-airflow environment.
In the past, I've daydreamed about drive manufacturers making drive chassis out of copper with integrated water paths running through them (effectively making a bigben design that is more compact and eliminates one more surface coupling to transfer heat through), but this will likely never happen and I can't do it on my own.
The revelation I had today [in the middle of a C++ lecture] was to build a block that epoxies onto the bottom of the drive, using the drive's aluminum chassis for the "baseplate". There is another thread floating around here somewhere that shows a guy testing temperatures of various drive surfaces to decide which was best to pick up heat. His conclusion was to use the bottom surface, and had bent a loop of copper tubing that would bend around and mate with this surface (somewhat ackwardly and with little surface area). How about doing away with the bottom of the tube, per say, and just using the drive to get more surface area and solve the ongoing dilemma of how to pick the heat up.
The drive I would be doing this to is a Maxtor 7200rpm 120gb SATA150. (can't remember model number). It has a good sized area of exposed chassis around the spindle motor, and this area has radially-oriented fins or ridges built into it. I'm thinking that a block could be made with 1/2" copper tubing for barbs and an exchanging housing made of formed copper sheet metal. It would be a rough rainbow shape to follow the half-round shape of the exposed metal and thin enough that the water would have to sort of surge up and down to go past the drive's formed ridges.
Any screw holes or other leak paths would have to be sealed with epoxy, and the whole housing would be glued onto the drive with a healthy bead of 30 minute epoxy to hold it together and seal it on.
The drive is aluminum and has a layer of what seems to be anodization. I doubt this could have any effect on thermal properties worth caring about, but what about galvonic troubles? People always seem to have issues with running copper and aluminum in the same system. Would a few square inches of mostly anodized aluminum have any effects of this nature?
Anyone have ideas for improvements or reasons it wouldn't work or would be a bad idea? (besides probably voiding the warranty on the drive)