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New Water-Cooled Hard Drives Coming

Posted by Zonk on Sat Aug 04, 2007 03:18 AM
from the can't-stop-the-fire dept.
Hardware
CoolHandLuke writes "NEC and Hitachi are teaming up on a liquid cooling system for hard drives. The goal is to cut down on noise levels while providing more efficient cooling. 'Hitachi and NEC are developing the water-cooled hard drive systems for desktop computers mainly to reduce noise levels to 25 decibels, 5 decibels quieter than a whisper. To do this, NEC and Hitachi actually wrap the hard drive in "noise absorbing material and vibration insulation." According to Hitachi and NEC, the cooling cold plate they're planning to use is the most efficient plate ever used for heat conduction, which means they'll be able to cool the hard drives quicker and more efficiently.'"
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[+] Terabyte Hard Drive Put To the Test 376 comments
EconolineCrush writes "As a technical milestone, Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive is undeniably impressive. The drive is the first to pack a trillion bytes into a standard 3.5" form factor, and while some may argue the merits of tebi versus tera, that's still an astounding accomplishment. Hitachi also outfitted the drive with 32MB of cache—double what you get with standard desktop drives—making this latest Deskstar a leader in both cache size and total capacity. That looks like a great formula for success on paper, but how does it pan out in the real world? The Tech Report has tested the 7K1000's performance, noise levels, and power consumption against 18 other drives to find out, with surprising results."
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  • I got a fishy error (Score:5, Funny)

    by LoonyMike (917095) on Saturday August 04 2007, @03:23AM (#20111611)
    Nothing for you to see here. Please swim along.
  • I believe you mean "quicklier and efficientlier."

  • Just one question: (Score:3, Interesting)

    by feepness (543479) on Saturday August 04 2007, @03:35AM (#20111649) Homepage
    Yes that's all well and good, but will it be efficient?

      • Despite your smartass response, what you quoted doesn't really answer the question.

        If you get a 1% on an exam five times and a 2% the next time, you can claim a lot of things: 100% improvement over previous models, your most efficient study method ever, a method that was more efficient than all previous methods (heck, if you got 6% on your 6th try you could claim more efficient than all previous methods combined), and a lot of other things.

        They're all, basically, marketing-speak phrases carefully design

  • What this smells like is innovation for the preservation of a certain price point and profit margin. Might be a good time to vote with dollars and simply say, "No thanks."
    • I think they are trying to stretch the old technology to stay ahead of solid state drives.

      I doubt it's the "most efficient heat dissipating" but I think someone would shriek if they were to announce they're making the casing out of massive chunk of beryllium oxide. ;)
      • I believe diamond has better heat conductivity than BeO and could make for louder shrieks in some scenarios ;).

  • Is this for a specialty market? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Glowing Fish (155236) on Saturday August 04 2007, @03:42AM (#20111675) Homepage
    Several people have already commented that they don't see the need for this, which is what I was going to say
    (because the hum of my harddrive is much less than the hum of several other things in my apartment, and much much less than I-5, which is just outside my window)
    But I imagine that there is still a few niche markets where the additional cost would be worth it. Is this designed for computers that are to be used in operating rooms, or research labs, or some other exotic locale where noise has to be kept down to a minimum?

  • Whisper (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Bombula (670389) on Saturday August 04 2007, @04:03AM (#20111751)
    I sure hope it's a LOT quieter than a whisper. If my machine sounded anything like as loud as a person constantly whispering I think I'd go out of my mind.
    • I thought 30db was people 10 meters away whispering. 25dB is a LOT quieter than that, possibly equivalent to nearly 20 meters away.

      • Re:Whisper (Score:5, Informative)

        by rm999 (775449) on Saturday August 04 2007, @04:51AM (#20111879)
        Very accurate. 30 db is about 4x more powerful than 24 db (i know you said 25, but when working with decibels you want to work in units of 3). The inverse square law says that power is inversely proportional to square of distance. Therefore, something that is 4x as powerful sounds the same at sqrt(10^2 * 4) = 20 meters

        BTW, I believe 30 db is a soft whisper at 5 meters, not 10. So something at 24 db would sound like a whisper from 10 meters - still, not bad.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I have no need for this. The voices in my mind drown out the noise of my PC.
  • ...that this is utterly stupid.

    I run all sorts of RAID arrays on a single box, from 0 to 6, and I've had points in time where they're all read/writing simultaneously. When they're idle, I can't tell them apart from the fans I have in place to cool them or their enclosures, and even those aren't what I'd call loud. When all the disks seek at once, esp. for the RAID-6, the noise either gets relegated as background noise by my brain, or isn't heard at all over soft music. Sure, if you're running 15k U320
    • You must be one of those guys with the ipod at full volume in the subway.

      I'm glad you are making something out of your deafness though :-)
    • Not all 15k hard drives are loud, I think for a while, Storage Review's quietest drives were a couple Savvio 15k drives. I have one in each of two computers and the only thing I hear is the seek noise where the head moves. My 10k hard drives are a different story. The transition to fluid bearings might have been between the two models.

  • I've been water cooling my hard drives for a while (Score:3, Interesting)

    by etymxris (121288) on Saturday August 04 2007, @04:14AM (#20111775) Homepage
    Hard drives are very easy to cool. The water block plates don't fit snuggly against the uneven surface of the hard drives' sides. But it doesn't matter. The whole drive is still cool to the touch, much cooler than decent air cooling can manage. In short, there really isn't a need for "the most efficient plate ever". And it won't do you much good besides, as last I checked, hard drives are not very flat on the sides or bottom.
    • Mod the parent up - liquid cooled HDD's aren't new at all. Maybe this model is or its one more company manufacturing the stuff, but definitely not new, and though a lot of us here on /. are gear-heads that look at just about everything on the market before making a buy, it definitely isn't news for nerds - TFA states its for desktops and

      "To do this, NEC and Hitachi actually wrap the hard drive in "noise absorbing material and vibration insulation."

      Which sounds exactly like every HDD cooling kit I've heard

  • More parts to breakdown and cause a system failure.

    I appreciate what they're doing here - for sure there's going to be a market, though I personally would be happier with passive solutions or better yet, a nice big fat FRAM drive :)

  • Cool drives? (Score:3, Informative)

    by vidarlo (134906) <.vidarlo. .at. .freakforum.nu.> on Saturday August 04 2007, @06:38AM (#20112221) Homepage
    A while ago I saw a study from google [slashdot.org] that said disks running at 40C was most reliable. Cooler drives died faster, and warmer drives died faster. So why does the manufacturer try to cool 'em? Seems to me that reliability increases if you don't keep 'em at 20C like many people do. And 40C is the temperature my 7200RPM disks reach in a normal cabinet (well, actually 35-38C)...
    • I've found out the hard way that hard drives don't like 60C. It's not good when the A/C dies in the server room of a storage company and nobody bothers reporting to engineering or IT that the A/C died.

      Huge pile of dead equipment from that fiasco.

  • Water cooling never needed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rAiNsT0rm (877553) on Saturday August 04 2007, @07:10AM (#20112337) Homepage
    This plays out every time exactly the same way and yet people fall for it every time. Just like SLi, water cooling is unnecessary. It is and has been used for bleeding edge performance *before* the technology is really at that level and certainly before the software is. If you wait 6month's to a year the hardware catches up, doesn;t need water cooling and around that time software begins to emerge that utilizes the new technology. So for 6 months you gain the ability to say oooh look at my watercooled setup that does nothing except maybe pump out high synthetic benchmarks since nothing utilizes it yet. Same with SLi.

    No developer is going to produce for a market that may be 1% of the total market. Once the technology reaches mainstream use (which watercooling and SLi never will) they then begin to utilize it. This has gone on since the days of mainframes, and continues in cycles right up until today... when will people learn?
    • Actually, in this case it's needed. Do you think HD manufacturers haven't been making HDs as cool and quiet as they could?

      By wrapping the drives in insulation and using water cooling to give the heat a pathway to escape, they can kill 5 decibels.

  • I want quiet and cold drives (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RubberDogBone (851604) * on Saturday August 04 2007, @07:50AM (#20112509)
    Right now, my main PC has three fans devoted just to keeping my drives cooled.

    My Tivo has long had the lid off and there's a special fan clamped next to it dedicated just to cooling the drive.

    That's four fans worth of noise just for drive cooling, far and away MUCH louder than any other noise in this room.

    If there's a way to keep them cold and quiet, I am in.
    • but really, if you took out those fans, would anything break?

      probably not.

      electronics are fine running hot up to a certain point. just because your drives are hot to the touch does not mean they are out of spec.
  • From my own experience with flash drives made by several different manufacturers, my guess would be that they won't make your heat problem go away. I currently use about 10 flash drives on a frequent basis, all either 2GB or 4GB and from several different manufacturers. After writing, say, 1 GB of files to one of them I can tell you it is HOT to the touch. We're talking way more than 30 or 35 degrees C here - more like 50.

    If you used flash for desktop storage right now I suspect a big array of flash drive
    • "25 decibels, 5 decibels quieter than a whisper."

      That's a ******* loud whisper!!

      No, it's not. [wikipedia.org]
      • That's a ******* loud whisper!!

        No, it's not.
        Well, to GP's credit, you're generally a tad closer than 5m to your computer. It's a 5m whisper is what it is. But I guess the rating on this is done in a completely silent science lab with guys in white coats and clipboards walking around, going, "Yeessss.... Mmmm-hmmmm.... I see...."

        Who here wishes their job was like that? Especially if you were one of those guys that crashes cars to see how awesome they mangle the body.

    • Go to SilentPCReview... (Score:5, Informative)

      by mrchaotica (681592) * on Saturday August 04 2007, @03:57AM (#20111733)

      ...and be enlightened [silentpcreview.com].

      • Re:Go to SilentPCReview... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by kklein (900361) on Saturday August 04 2007, @09:28AM (#20113045)

        I have used that site extensively for the design of my computer. It's the quietest PC I've ever encountered.

        Noise is a huge problem these days, and I'd expect it to especially affect the Slashdot readership, since the majority of them are likely to be introverts. Introverts suffer from brain overstimulation all the time. Noise, crowds, situations that require constant attention to multiple variables, push us over the edge and drive us nuts. This is why we are drawn to jobs that require hours of uninterrupted attention, such as those in programming or academia. We find such things calming and are very good at them.

        The effect of PC noise, however, is not one of which I was aware until I was working on my master's thesis and, just as an experiment, put on the noise-canceling headphones I use on planes while I was sitting at my desk writing. They killed the sound of my 3 80mm fans, the 60mm on my video card, and the smaller one on my southbridge. In one shot, I wrote for 6 hours straight, blissfully focused.

        After that, I spent a lot of time and money upgrading my computer to be as silent as possible. I have a fanless PSU. A large, slow Zalman CPU cooler. I replaced the southbridge fan with a heatsink. I have a fanless video card. Air flow is achieved via 2 slow 120mm fans. Hard drives are mounted on rubber grommets.

        All that being said, the computer is still noisier than I'd like, and 100% of the perceptible noise is that of the hard drives (well, CD/DVD drives don't really count, because you don't usually use them). I use only Seagate drives, which seem to be the quietest, but anything that could further reduce the whine (without mounting my drives on surgical tubing, something you can read about at SilentPCReview) would be absolutely welcome.

        Just as the constant whine of an airplane's engines causes you to be exhausted at your destination, the constant whine of fans and other moving parts can exhaust you in front of your computer. I welcome any development to further reduce the noise footprint of today's PCs!

    • The market is clearly for college students, specifically computer science majors, who live in dorm rooms and have to leave their desktop/server running all night because the kid down the hall might just need your copy of Quake 3.iso at three in the morning and you don't want to have to wake up just to turn on your computer. They're going to sell millions.

      • Depends on how much more expensive than regular drives they'll be. In the situation you presented I'd much rather buy an Asus router with an internal HDD or external HDD in a USB/FireWire rack. Always on, saves on both power and noise. Sure, not so cool, but the heat is within normal levels. Beats keeping the whole computer running all the time.

    • While quiet is good for the consumer sector in general do people really find HDD noise annoying enough at 7.5K rotational speeds to justify the extra cost and complexity?


      Acutally, yes, I do.

      Its more than noise, however. We don't need a more efficient cooling system, we need a hard drive that uses less power and generates less heat.

      The whole path that desktops are going down (except for the occasional exception such as a mac mini) is one of more power, more heat, more fans, more noise.

      This is, to my mind, the grossest abuse of Moore's law that can be had. Instead, we should be building smaller and lower powered devices. Perhaps it simply reflects how cheap energy is that we choose to build computers this way.

      So now we can build a whole class of hard drives that suck more power from the wall, confident that they won't make as much noise?

      Am I the only one who sees the folly of this?

      Michael

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Charcharodon (611187)
        This is a niche market item one that I have a use for in my media PC since it is already plumbed for water cooling and my end goal is to make it 100% silent. Solid state drives are very interesting they use less than 1 watt and are compeletely silent and fairly cool, but they are very slow and the price per unit is unacceptable for my storage needs. If I were to use them it would be to simply to make a front device for the living room and then put a full blown noisy server in a closet someplace else in th
      • "The whole path that desktops are going down (except for the occasional exception such as a mac mini) is one of more power, more heat, more fans, more noise."

        Really? Seems to me computers are quieter now than they were 5+ years ago, despite the much larger power supplies and faster processors.

        Video card fans now adjust with gpu temp instead of just spinning at 100% constantly.

        Hard drives have already become much quieter than they use to be in the late 90s.

        Newer desktop CPUs can throttle down au

        • Tell me, how exactly does one abuse an observation?


          Same way you abuse anything else - quantum physics (nuclear power or bombs), chemistry (medicines or nerve gas), arable land (corn for tortillas or petrol additive).

          The abuse that I see here is that we should be smart enough to not abuse our knowledge and resources for short term gains at a long term cost.

          What we do with the evolution in technology is our choice, certainly.

          It was not so long ago that people used to laugh at why you would need a 200W power supply for a computer. Now it seems that 500 watts are common enough, and some are going significantly higher than this.

          There is no law of physics that demanded this increase in power consumption. It was a choice by manufacturers and consumers.

          There are certainly some times when it makes sense to throw the power at the circuitry, but for the most part its just wasted time. To my mind the ideal computer would run at close to 100% CPU utilisation all the time, but the whole system would reduce its power and speed to match the load requirements. Likewise, standby power should be very close to zero - we do this for laptops so much better than for many desktops.

          I guess its my personal ethos showing here. Nothing more, nothing less.

          Anyway, I hope that explains my position on why I think its an abuse. Energy is cheap, but it may not be for too much longer.

          The world really doesn't need a hard drive that sucks more power quietly, at least not for most computers.

          Hopefully in a few short years flash drives will overtake hard drives and everyone wins.

          Michael

          • Re:And the market is? (Score:5, Insightful)

            by drsmithy (35869) <drsmithyNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Saturday August 04 2007, @06:00AM (#20112089)

            It was not so long ago that people used to laugh at why you would need a 200W power supply for a computer. Now it seems that 500 watts are common enough, and some are going significantly higher than this.

            They're nowhere near as common as enthusiast sites would have you believe, and even in most machines that have them, they're not using anything close to 500W of juice.

            The average PC is a low-end desktop that probably barely even peaks at much over 100W of power draw.

            There is no law of physics that demanded this increase in power consumption.

            Sure there is. It's the cost of greater computing power, within the limitations of current technology.

            Hopefully in a few short years flash drives will overtake hard drives and everyone wins.

            Flash drives aren't going to replace hard disks in the near future as they are highly unlikely to be able to come close to the same size/cost ratio of hard disks.

        • Re:And the market is? (Score:4, Informative)

          by cecil_turtle (820519) on Saturday August 04 2007, @10:09AM (#20113303)

          HEAT? put a fan across the drives make a GIANT difference in drive longevity.
          You may be interested in reading this article [stanford.edu] and for even more information this paper [google.com]. Apparently Google collects performance/environmental/failure data against their entire computing infrastructure and has over 5 years worth of this data. In this analysis (of likely hundreds of thousands of drives of different types / manufacturers over a long period) they found little to no correlation between heat and failure rate of the drives.

          Power use, well that one you have a choice. Low power and slow. high power and fast. please pick one.
          To better qualify that statement, "slow" and "fast" are only relative to each other, not necessarily a user's experience on a particular application. A high percentage of the time, a "slow" machine will suffice just fine (as per your example).

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by chengmi (725888)

        If you're going to complain about the grandparent's post over an apostrophe, you'd better make damn sure that your post is perfect.

        Hint: CAPTCHA [wikipedia.org] is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart

      • Re:In my last house... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Znork (31774) on Saturday August 04 2007, @09:03AM (#20112901)
        Personally I've moved to using iSCSI on my desktops. Every single one is booted off PXE and mounts its disks over the network (with very close to native performance; gigabit copes well with iSCSI, and the memory in the iSCSI target machines works nicely as cache). Blessed silence ensues, with care for CPU and PSU fans, the desktops become close to inaudible.

        The server cabinet is slightly more noisy, but with care taken to soundproofing and with sound-absorbing vent channels and the disks mounted on vibration reducing material, it doesnt sound more than modern fridge.

        Adding yet another cooling bus to the desktop sounds like a supremely unpalatable idea. It's much easier and much more reliable to move data over the network than it is to move water around in a computer.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by r_jensen11 (598210)

          Adding yet another cooling bus to the desktop sounds like a supremely unpalatable idea. It's much easier and much more reliable to move data over the network than it is to move water around in a computer.

          The problem with this is that it requires you to have another closet or room to store the hard drives. People living in places like dorms or small apartments, or just apartments where they aren't allowed to do things like install sound-absorbing materials can't apply your "easier and much more reliable" plan.

        • My room has an old Dell PowerEdge sitting in the corner. It's so loud, I had to turn my music up enough to shake the floor and freak the neighbor's dog before I could tell what I was playing.

          Sleeping there is fun. :|

          -:sigma.SB

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by diamondsw (685967) on Saturday August 04 2007, @03:57AM (#20111735)
      The biggest factor in keeping them down to acceptable levels is just mounting them on soft rubber grommits.

      You also need fans to keep them cool. After the CPU and GPU, the hard drive is the hottest thing in your computer. Especially in drive arrays or servers, they can heat up extremely quickly with sustained usage.

      If this works like it sounds, then it will not only quiet the drive, but cool it more efficiency and allow less external cooling (fans), which should quiet things down even more.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Jeff DeMaagd (2015)
        How much in a server room is actually water cooled? Server rooms seem to be the place where the people buying the hardware don't really care how loud it is.

        Anyway, proper cooling doesn't mean loud. If you need a personal system, try silent PC review.

        Right now, I have a Mac Pro with four 7200RPM hard drives, sitting three feet away, and I really don't hear the thing at all.
        • There's a limit on how far air cooling can go on any given class of equipment, where a different cooling medium is simply more effective and efficient. Low noise systems may be at the forefront, but it's just not feasible to increase air cooling in servers and data centers beyond a certain point, as air can't carry away as much energy as water. Server hardware will get to a point where even a freezing cold tornado is insufficient to cool all equipment.

          Could be many reasons, the space requirements for large
    • And also it seems like solid state storage is a much better way to keep hard disks quiet and cool while getting lots of other good features too, like low power consumption and random access. And it'll mean you won't have to deal with condensation and other issues involved with having water inside of an electrical appliance.

      • Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Charcharodon (611187) on Saturday August 04 2007, @05:15AM (#20111961)
        There won't be any condensation unless you chill the water.

        Solid state is the future, but right now it is very slow, small, and expensive. Until they start offerring them at flash chip prices and in a SATA format so you can RAID enough of them together to get some usefull performance numbers stardard HD will still be on top.

        • I don't see any earthly reason why they couldn't RAID them under the hood, as it were. One SATA port, a controller which presents to the host PC as a single drive but actually spreads the data across many flash chips.

          Of course, then the controller on the drive would be a lot more complicated...

          • Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Charcharodon (611187) on Saturday August 04 2007, @05:58AM (#20112085)
            Right now it's a novelty price point issue. There is no way they'll stay above $300 for a 32gb drive for very long. Give it a year or two and you'll probably see just that. Considering you can get 16gb in a flash drive a laptop flash drive or a 3.5 HD shell has a silly amount of empty space which can be used to increase capacity and performance. There is no reason they couldn't set up and internal RAID like arrangement to be able to saturate a SATA connection. Right now we just have to wait for market and Mooore's to work their magic on price point.

            If that is too much to ask for then they just need to set up rows of SATA/USB ports that just let me plug 10-15 memeory sticks straight into the mother board so that a standard RAID solution can be used.

      • You obviously haven't been following the recent relative price trends with respect to solid state and platter based technologies.

        The real question about water cooling for platter based technology is... Why? Especially when solid state is about to overtake platter technology.

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