The system I'm designing is going to be using U160 SCSI hard drives, almost certainly the Seagate Cheetah line of 10 and 15K rpm drives. These drives are big and fast, but also are supposed to have problems with running hot and being a bit noisy.
I want a near silent PC, so I'm planning to watercool most everything in order to get rid of as many fans as I can.
Everything I've seen on these drives says that extreme attention should be paid to cooling on any drive that runs 7200 rpm or faster. Most of the solutions proposed involve putting the drives in 5.25" sleds with screamer fans and using the external drive bays. I don't like this approach because it involves fans, and uses external bays which I've always found to be a precious resource. I want to put my in the drives in the 3.5" internal drives bays that were created just for them
I've only found a few places that discussed WC approaches for hard drives. Rotor3 (name?) had a really nice looking block on his website. (which I've frequently seen pointed to from here) It's a copper sandwich with partial holes and cross cuts in each half, with the barbs screwed into the seam. It looks nice, but I have a few concerns about it. I didn't see much to make the water circulate through the entire block, as opposed to just doing a short loop through the first few cross passages. Also I have mixed feelings about putting the barbs into the seam of a block that was screwed together. Seems a bit leak prone to me.
Another person put a CPU block on the top of a drive and wrapped it in foam. It was reported to work, but I would have thought something that covered the entire top would have worked better.
Being lazy, and not overly into aesthetics, I was thinking of just getting a drive sized peice of copper plate, probably 1/8" or 1/4", and a length of 1/4" copper tube and sweating a maze loop onto one side. I'd suspet this would be easier than machining a block. I would then slap the flat side onto the drive cover. I could even do different sizes for 3.5" drives and 5.25" devices like DVD burners
None of these devices generate THAT much heat, Seagate says the drives only do 18 watts, and thats over a far bigger area than a CPU. I know I'd have some interface losses due to the copper/solder/coper joint, but I doubt it would hurt me that bad. I also know the 1/4" (or I could be talked into 3/8"
) tubing isn't going to give me much flow, but I'm planning to run the device circuit in parallel with the CPU circuits so I don't see the restriction as a major problem.
Any reason why it wouldn't work?
Any other suggestions for low budget, preferably home made drive water coolers?
Thanks,
Gooserider