Hard Drive Water Block...

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?

I wouldn't worry too much about the heat it dumps in your loop. You are right, they produce very little heat. But, they do add restriction and make your pump work harder. If you don't have a fairly powerful pump, adding a bunch of unnecessary blocks (chipset, HDD, ram?) can hurt the entire loop's performance.

lemme take a stab at it.
it makes the most sense if the hard drive is the first thing on yout loop. youll have the coolest water returning after the radiator.
the rule of thumb i use is to stay below 40C for HDD's the cooler - the better for longevity, but from what i hear, i wont have a problem with their lifespan because i have samsung drives anyway.
yas, i use a drive cooler i think its a koolance model, with the mylar bag type stuff. yes, its a PITA because it uses 1/4" tubing thats smaller than most stuff out there, and yes its allmost impossible to bleed all the air out of a flat, horizontal bag, and of course with air being an a floating insulator, if you dont bleed it good, youll just have an air bubble at the top of the bag where the hard drive sits.
something else to keep in mind - if your W/C system isnt powerful enough, and the "cold" side of your loop (after the radiator) is above 40C its not worth it as much. my cold side runs right near the ambient temp of the room, so for me, why not? my "radiator" (allthough its nothing more than my own secretly designed...heat remover) can remove silly, silly amounts of heat. i could add another machine or two to the loop before my temps went up. with that in mind, i say why not cool my HDD and ram and all the rest?

secondly, that stuff about "adding heat to the loop and making it less -efficient-" is total BS. you might raise the water temperature a degree or two, but as long as that ends up getting dumped out the radiator, (assuming it has the oomph to remove an extra bit of heat) your temps wont change. if your rad is too small for the load youre trying to put through it, youll see higher temps. all things being equal hore heat in=higher water temperature=more heat out. why does that make no sense? because your ability to remove heat is fixed (assuming the radiator stays the same and has the same airflow) add some heat, and guess what? temperatures go up. youll have to add more airflow to get the temps back down, or upsize the rad.
the efficiency of water cooling is determined by how much heat the system can dissapate compared to how much it produces and the wild card is ambient temperature. from there we can look at it all and look at the original temps of the components and judge efficiency.
it can either handle the heat load or not. thats detirmined by surface area, and airflow, and the efficiency of the waterblocks, etc... most radiators (even the newest bestest most expensive gold plated gamer editions of those "three fan rad"' models) made for computer cooling are highly undersized and barely have enough reserve to take more heat without a bump in temps. sure you get great temps compared to air cooling, but you would still see it if you added another 15 or 20W of heat to the loop. the question isnt: "is it going to make things too hot?" its more like "what is the extra degree or two of heat worth?" if you just cant have another degree or two, you need to increase your ability to remove that extra heat. (more airflow, more surface area (bigger rad) etc.

not to mention a hotter radiatior is MORE efficient than a cooler one at the same ambient temperature with the same airflow. it dissapates more heat! only catch is that if we wanted our rads at their most efficient, the water in out loop would be far too hot to "cool" something like computer equipment. - but the hotter the water the more "efficient" the radiator will be.
computers, and computer overclocking isnt the arena of efficiency.
from now on try substitutine the word "effective" for "efficient".

a more direct answer is: i bet cooling the vidcard and the CPU and the drive will have your cold side too hot anyway. youll likely heat up the hard drive instead of cooling it, with that hardware anyway.
WELCOME!

Yeah.. Im thinking about the Danger Den D5 pump. It puts out about 5+ psi. I hear the pressure drop from the high end CPU water blocks is around 3 psi at 1.5 gallons per minute and maybe 4 psi at 2 gpm. The tdx is maybe 2 psi at 2 gpm and I dont know what kind of pressure drop to expect from a 3 fan thermochill or blackice gt. So I think I will just go with the TDX waterblock. It performs around 3 degrees less ( or something like that all things considered) but since I am unsure of the pressure drops in my loop... I think I will just go with the lower restriction blocks.

As of now.. I only plan to cool a conroe and my harddrives... so I dont think there is too much to worry about. I may want to add a single GPU cooler for the r600 when it comes out.. but if it puts out as much heat as people seem to be expecting.. I may just go for air cooling. Will have to wait and see what kind of heat those things release and what kind of performance people can get out of them.

Thanks for your reply OrionLion. Yes.. I did think about that. I would want to put my CPU after the pump on the cool side and the hard drive cooler after. And this could cause a problem if the water temperature after the CPU block is higher than the harddrive. This would possibly warm the drive and not cool it.

According to anandtech... the idle temp of the Raptor they reviewed was around 40 celsius. So there is a chance I suppose that my water temp would be above 40. It depends on how much I can overclock the conroe and how well my radiator works.

But what do you think about this... so... I would probably like to keep the CPU below 50 degrees and from what I have seen many overclockers getting with decent setups... they seem to get the CPU to maybe 42-45 pushing decently. So in that case... I would imagine that the water temp would be around the same temp. Most likely lower than the CPU temp in the loop. So "if" my system were to run at 45 for example.. then I would still have cooler water going into the hard drive block when the hard drive is running full heat (which is around 50) so I would cool it at least a bit. The downside would be that I would warm it a few degrees when it is idle.. but maybe that isnt so bad since it is in the 40s? What do you think?

I would like to get a temperature gauge and see what kind of temps I have at various places in my loop... but the temp gauges I have seen seem poor. A couple had low diameter fittings ( i wanna run half inch) and they all seem to have quick disconnect fittings. I kinda wanna stay away from them. Maybe they are completely water tight... but I like the idea of the push on ones for extra safety. Something about the quick disconnects rubs me the wrong way.

orionlion82 said:

most radiators (even the newest bestest most expensive gold plated gamer editions of those "three fan rad"' models) made for computer cooling are highly undersized and barely have enough reserve to take more heat without a bump in temps. sure you get great temps compared to air cooling, but you would still see it if you added another 15 or 20W of heat to the loop. the question isnt: "is it going to make things too hot?" its more like "what is the extra degree or two of heat worth?" if you just cant have another degree or two, you need to increase your ability to remove that extra heat. (more airflow, more surface area (bigger rad) etc.

not to mention a hotter radiatior is MORE efficient than a cooler one at the same ambient temperature with the same airflow. it dissapates more heat! only catch is that if we wanted our rads at their most efficient, the water in out loop would be far too hot to "cool" something like computer equipment. - but the hotter the water the more "efficient" the radiator will be.
computers, and computer overclocking isnt the arena of efficiency.
from now on try substitutine the word "effective" for "efficient".

a more direct answer is: i bet cooling the vidcard and the CPU and the drive will have your cold side too hot anyway. youll likely heat up the hard drive instead of cooling it, with that hardware anyway.
WELCOME!

Click to expand...

Some of the things you said are right and make sense. However, you have some misunderstandings. A three fan rad is completely overrated for most setups, not underrated. Take a look at the BTU ratings and do some simple computations for how much heat wattage they can dissipate. Dumping 15-20 watts on a triple rad with moderate airflow will make absolutely no difference in temps.

The issue about the radiator being hotter and being more efficient just makes no sense to me. Watercooling merely uses water to conduct heat energy from one location to another. It does not need to be and should never be hot at all to effectively conduct heat. Heat transfer is about the Delta T, or the difference in temp between the water and the cooler air that the heat energy is being dissipated into. The higher the Delta T, the higher the heat transfer. Good water flow, air flow, radiator efficiency, block efficiency, etc. all contribute to a higher Delta T and increased heat transfer.

Cooling the hard drives will not heat them up. That makes no sense whatsoever. The ability of water to transfer heat is so much greater than air that the hard drives are going to get a lot cooler. My Aquadrive knocks off 7-10c more than just on an intake fan, and I have my CPU and GPU in the same loop also.

I am not sure what kind of performance I will get out of my system.. so I was making a worst case scenario. I would think that the water coming out of my CPU block would be fairly low and would lower the temp of my drives. But...if somehow the water coming out was about 50C... then it wouldnt help much. But... I cant really imagine that the water would be this hot. But as I am new to watercooling... I was just thinking about the worst situation.

BTW... sorry if my reply is short... but my friends computer doesnt have a spacebar and I have to paste all the spaces in

Something would be dreadfully wrong if your water temp was 50c!

Pasting spaces in would get old real fast...