Hard Drive Cooler

Radiical Hard Drive Cooler

Date Log; February 25, 2006

There seems to be a lot of opinions about hard drive cooling and water cooling hard drives in particular. One side says its not worth the extra money while others are equally interested in emphasizing what should be obvious to all. Hard drives fail when they get hot.

You could of course trust in a very large and noisy fan to take care of the cooling but if you are used to the quietness afforded by modern water cooling its seems almost a retrograde step to increase the noise by using fans.

So what if you didn't bother with any cooling. Simple, possibly nothing would happen........... if you are lucky you could go on for years without any cooling at all. I have for several years had no additional cooling for the hard drives in my own PC until of course we reached one of those milestone summer days that are now occurring very regularly. All of my own music that is music which I had composed, played, painstakingly mixed and converted to Mp3 and all of my personal data save for the backups I had retained was all gone. It is a bit devastating when it happens and I think it happens all to regularly. So today we introduce our hard drive cooler which we think will address some of the concerns of at least those who see the need for such cooling.

Hard drive coolers seem to have evolved into two distinct design forms. The base cooling method. (pictures courtesy of Asetek)

and the side rail method of cooling.

Both forms of cooling a hard drive are the subject of some discussion in the water cooling scene with some claiming one method is superior to the other. There appears to be no clear answer to this question of efficiency because both designs use differing mounting procedures. Basically the base plate mounting method is designed to fit into a floppy drive bay where as the side rail design favors the CD rom bay. Usually the type of design used simply means that there is no adaptability and that only the one mounting method is available.

On a Pros and Cons basis the more restrictive floppy drive bay (base plate) mounting method is inherently less able to use more conventional methods of air cooling but is able to transfer some of the generated heat into the metal of the case structure increasing the cooling surface area. This can contribute to in case build up of air temperature over time. With no passive ways of removing the heat build up this will mean more powerful fans are required to remove the built up heat with of course more fan noise.

The side rail mounting system on the other hand allows greater air cooling in a larger less restrictive CD rom bay but with some high speed hard drives people have mentioned increases of hard drive sound. Side rail mounting does however have the ability to place the greater amount of heat into the coolant and pass that to the radiator for disposal into the surrounding atmosphere. The shortfall of this design being that the heat generated inside the hard drive has to travel to the edges of the hard drive frame before it can be removed.

Now if you have a headache in considering which of the two designs is better or worse join the club so have I.

©The simplest answer to any problem is a straight line.

So in design terms why not combine the two methods and end not only the thermal efficiency debate but solve the other issues as well. First let us have a look at the basic unit we can start with. It must of course be the base plate mounting unit.

Of course if you have one of those drives with zero screw mounts well lets add in an adhesive thermal pad to mount the hard drive cooler.

Okay, so we have solved the fitting of the unit into the floppy drive bay with a suitably sized base unit. Next we adapt it using two side rails.

Now we have solved adapting the hard drive cooler to side rail mounting in a CD rom bay and also addressed sound generation by adding two rubber mounts per side to absorb any introduced vibration. We have also converted the heat absorption from just the base plate of the hard drive to the base plate and both sides of the hard drive frame. Now there is no absorption of heat into the case material and the heat goes where it should go into the water and out of the case via the water cooling system. Air flow around the hard drive has increased providing another positive outcome.

I suppose the final design concept will be the barb sizes that can be used so that the hard drive coolers is tubing size adaptable. Easy, standard G1/4 fittings make 10mm, 3/8" and 1/2" tubing sizes available.

Flow rate impacts.

Adding a hard drive cooler to the loop has often been thought of as a kiss of death to flow rates and up to this point that may have been the case. Just to confirm the flow rate impacts of this design we carried out a series of tests to establish the hard drive coolers affect on coolant flow rate. The worst case scenario that we could create was with a Laing D5 pump, CWX CPU block, GPU block and hard drive cooler in place. We used 3/8" tubing to deliver the final impact on the pump rate. After ten trials the impact on flow rate by adding this hard drive cooler to the loop was a miserly decrease in flow of 0.5 L/Min.

Oh, we must make a last adjustment after all if you buy a hard drive cooler why not flaunt it. Add provision for two LED fitting points. (One LED is included with the kit).

There you have it a multi adaptable hard drive cooler with an adjustable mounting system that is able to handle all of your hard drives cooling needs.