The total lack of fans is partially to see if it can be done effectively and tastefully, but it's primarily because of the noise and just the fact that it gives me a project to work on. I have 3 computers running beside me right now and it sounds like a freight train is coming through my living room--all of them started off with quiet fans, but they only stay quiet for so long. I do have plans for this being incorporated into a piece of furniture. I'm designing a computer that won't even be recognized as a computer and I don't want a piece of furniture humming or blowing air. This is not a practical project, it's just supposed to be fun.
I realize that 8 drives spinning constantly will generate some noise, but as I'm designing this case, I can bury them behind a foot of wood (I won't), decouple them from the case etc. Ideally, I'd like to get enough effective watercooling for all heat producing parts that I have the freedom of designing this into a piece of furniture that is almost totally enclosed--fans wouldn't give me as much freedom.
I really like the idea of custom hdd cooling, but I'm not real excited about 8 drives side by side. That would take up a lot of realestate and force me into building something fairly wide or fairly deep. The other flexibility I wanted was to start off this RAID array with perhaps as few as 4 drives and pick up the other four as price drops and need arises. This means I would like to keep the drives semi accessible. Would I need to use some thermal paste or something along those lines between the copper waterblooks and the drives? If so I imagine I couldn't pry that up everytime I wanted to seat another drive next to it. Would a 2 row high stack of 4 work with 3 waterblocks--or perhaps a stack of 4 with 2 drives on each row and 5 waterblocks work? It would mean that there is a waterblock cooling the bottom and top of drives though and that might not work--I don't know.
I'm also trying to get a handle of just how large a radiator I will need. It will almost certainly not be incorporated into the piece of furniture, but be totally external and probably vertically oriented to save on space and eyesore. I came across a review comparing the Cape CORA 642 Convect Maxi and the Innovatek Konvekt-o-Matic Maxi. Both seemed about the same size and performed about the same (the Innovatek had about a 1C better cooling rating). I've found no heat dissipation data on the Cape Cora, but the Innovatek Maxi reports a value of about 125w. Now for the stupid question: do I simply take the reported watt figures of my drives, processor, gpu (system ram?) and use those figures to determine the amount of radiator needed? Two Innovatek Maxis would give me 250watts of heat dissipation and 8 300 or 400 seagate, 1 processor (a pentium M) and a videocard (I have a few 16 and 32mb cards sitting around that I'll use if I can find a workable waterblock for them) comes out to around 300watts. Am I wrong in thinking that I could get away with 3 Maxis and that this would actually be overkill? As far as pumps go, can you put pumps in series?
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