Hello everyone. I know this has been discussed in the past ( and recently ) but I wanted to start a new thread because the most recent one seemed to have turned into an argument.
So... I am planning on building a new setup and I think I am going to put the Danger Den Aqua Drive in. From what I can gather, the following points seem to be agreed upon.
1) Hard drives don't really need water cooling. Fans are fine.
2) Keeping your hard drive cool will probably prolong its life somewhat.
So one camp says that they are good because they will prolong your drive and keep the computer quieter.
Others say that its a waste of money and that you add heat to your cooling loop and thus make it less efficient.
So I was looking into it since I am going to run two Raptor drives which are hotter than other drives. I went to anandtech.com and found the newer Raptor 150GB. In his tests... one of them ran at about 50 degrees Celsius. This reading came from the SMART sensor on the drive. So take that as you will. ( http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2690&p=8 )
I then went to Western Digital's site and looked up the specs of the drive. It says that the operating temps are 5 to 55 Celsius operating and -40 to 65 Celsius non-operating. It also says that the power dissipation is about 10 watts when reading and writing. ( http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=189&Language=en)
What I take from this is that the temperature of a raptor running is fairly hot and fairly close to the listed operating temperature. And also that it only emits about 10 watts of power. The newer pentiums dissipate something around 90+ watts and the conroes will dissipate something like 65-80. When compared to a hard drive... this is quite a lot.
So when people mention that you are dumping all of this heat into the loop... I have to wonder how much of a difference that will make. Perhaps if you are running only a one-fan radiator every little bit matters... but I would imagine that it wouldnt matter too much if you are running a two or three fan radiator. Maybe I am completely off the mark here... but I think that if you have a decent setup... the power from the harddrives wont suddenly make your turbo charged system suck. It would decrease it slightly with a decent setup and perhaps would make you shift your CPU down a bit if you are only running a one-fan radiator.
I am getting a three-fan rad and the only thing I am concerned about right now is the ATI r600. It seems that high end models "might" use 300 watts of power. If this is the case... I may run into problems keeping the GPU and the CPU on the same loop.
Anyway... what do you guys think... is the little amount of heat from the hard drives going to drastically change your systems cooling power?
So... I am planning on building a new setup and I think I am going to put the Danger Den Aqua Drive in. From what I can gather, the following points seem to be agreed upon.
1) Hard drives don't really need water cooling. Fans are fine.
2) Keeping your hard drive cool will probably prolong its life somewhat.
So one camp says that they are good because they will prolong your drive and keep the computer quieter.
Others say that its a waste of money and that you add heat to your cooling loop and thus make it less efficient.
So I was looking into it since I am going to run two Raptor drives which are hotter than other drives. I went to anandtech.com and found the newer Raptor 150GB. In his tests... one of them ran at about 50 degrees Celsius. This reading came from the SMART sensor on the drive. So take that as you will. ( http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2690&p=8 )
I then went to Western Digital's site and looked up the specs of the drive. It says that the operating temps are 5 to 55 Celsius operating and -40 to 65 Celsius non-operating. It also says that the power dissipation is about 10 watts when reading and writing. ( http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=189&Language=en)
What I take from this is that the temperature of a raptor running is fairly hot and fairly close to the listed operating temperature. And also that it only emits about 10 watts of power. The newer pentiums dissipate something around 90+ watts and the conroes will dissipate something like 65-80. When compared to a hard drive... this is quite a lot.
So when people mention that you are dumping all of this heat into the loop... I have to wonder how much of a difference that will make. Perhaps if you are running only a one-fan radiator every little bit matters... but I would imagine that it wouldnt matter too much if you are running a two or three fan radiator. Maybe I am completely off the mark here... but I think that if you have a decent setup... the power from the harddrives wont suddenly make your turbo charged system suck. It would decrease it slightly with a decent setup and perhaps would make you shift your CPU down a bit if you are only running a one-fan radiator.
I am getting a three-fan rad and the only thing I am concerned about right now is the ATI r600. It seems that high end models "might" use 300 watts of power. If this is the case... I may run into problems keeping the GPU and the CPU on the same loop.
Anyway... what do you guys think... is the little amount of heat from the hard drives going to drastically change your systems cooling power?
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