New Water-Cooled Hard Drives Coming 145
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.'"
I got a fishy error (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I got a fishy error (Score:5, Funny)
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Mine only goes to 10, you insensitive clod!
[verb] [article] [plural noun] [adjective?] (Score:2, Funny)
And the market is? (Score:1)
In my last house... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:In my last house... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Although I realize this article is talking specifically about storage devices, consider that some things, such as high-end video cards, need to be local. If you're already doing watercooling to have quiet high-performance graphics, why not add your hard drive to the loop and get rid of a case fan?
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True, if you already do have watercooling it might very well make sense. Altho I'd argue it's slightly different as the graphics will only need the cooling running while they're actively used.
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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.
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I've found that there is considerable latency using NFS and the system doesn't handle large file i/o operations, even on a gigabit network.
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The disadvantage compared to NFS is I cant easily duplicate a system through a simple copy. On the other hand
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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
Go to SilentPCReview... (Score:5, Informative)
...and be enlightened [silentpcreview.com].
Re:Go to SilentPCReview... (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Stubbing my toe to not feel the pain in my head? (Score:2)
Why in the hell would I want to quiet or cancel out the pink noise from my computer, only to become more aware of the barking dogs, boombox cars, screaming brats, and fighting cats, which I can't cancel out except with the barrel of a gun and a vacation to another very unquiet and unpeaceful place? [Well, excepting Solitary Confinement, which it seems might be ideal for you.]
Methinks you've merely discovered one e
Re:Stubbing my toe to not feel the pain in my head (Score:2)
And there you have why I haven't done much with it since moving to my new apartment in Tokyo. This building is crawling with kids, and, being Japanese kids, they do nothing but scream. Right outside my window. Right next to where I have to set my computer up.
But at least there's my office on campus. Only there there's a telephone and panicked coworkers asking for stats help with their unsalvageable research project 2 days before presenting at some conference. Not too bad during summer vacation, thoug
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You're confusing introvertedness and geekiness with Asperger's Syndrome. Yes, some people are introverted and geeky because they have difficulty dealing with noise, crowds, and people. However, other people -- like me -- simply like playing with cool toys.
I don't think I am, and "likes cool toys" is not a predictor of introversion as far as I've read. Asperger's Syndrome is characterized by more than just avoidance of input; it's characterized by "repetitive behavior patterns and impairment in social interaction" (Wikipedia). Introversion/extroversion is a psychological continuum, just like anything.
Granted, IANA psychologist, but I have done some research on the introversion/extroversion scale as it pertains to choice in language programs and therefor
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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.
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Re:And the market is? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Abuse of Moore's Law? Tell me, how exactly does one abuse an observation?
It just seems like everyone treats Moore's Law like it's something more than an observation and prediction.
Re:And the market is? (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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.
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Part of the problem is that many computer power supplies seem to be incapable of running near their rating. As such, builders have adapted by way overspecing the power supply (ie, a "500W" power supply for a computer that might draw 200W max). For some reason, we just accept this.
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That depends. They are much quieter, much faster, no spin-up, less energy used, more reliable... I look forward to computers that run from flash - or Phase based memory. We'll keep media files on disk, that are spun down for most of their live. These drives should be build to have fast spinup time, low energy consumption and better reliability as
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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
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Power use, well that one you have a choice. Low power and slow. high power and fast. please pick one.
If you want low power use get a segate laptop hard drive. coupled with a Via C7 processor and compatable motherboard I have a very useable PC for internet and other basic home uses that draws 19 watts of power going full tilt. Works great for most peop
Re:And the market is? (Score:4, Informative)
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Unfortunately in this case they aren't doing away with the fan, just using a smaller one. It would be much cooler (ahem) if they instead could engineer a passive heat dissipation radiato
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Actually, according to what I've read [silentpcreview.com], that sort of thing would work better the higher the temperature differential. So, if it doesn't work at first, overclock! (Or add a TEC.)
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Hey, guess what: the kind of drive you want exists [wdc.com] too! (Not to mention, of course, that 2.5" drives also meet your criteria and have been around since forever.)
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do people really find HDD noise annoying enough at 7.5K rotational speeds to justify the extra cost and complexity?
Yes. I have a Shuttle SD11G5 Pentium-M based box for an always-on server, which sits in the bedroom closet. The shuttle cooler is roughly 27 db at 1 meter. The WD5000KS drive in it, picked for its quietness, is about 29 db at 1 meter. At night when all is quiet I can hear the unit clearly, even 3 meters away in the closet. If I could get the whole thing down to 25 db @1m I would like it more. That would be achieved by running with the fan stopped under normal-to-medium load and this hard disk.
To be
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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
Just one question: (Score:3, Interesting)
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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
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No fishy errors, just a fishy smell (Score:3, Interesting)
Could be Re:No fishy errors, just a fishy smell (Score:2)
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.
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PS
I have some BeO that's in some old VSLI chips. A 4"x2" 'integrated circuit' is cool and would stay cool too if it were still functional.
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There must be zillions of uses for inexpensive large pieces of diamond.
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I'm not sure how well this can take off though: I'd be willing to bet that most of the hard drive money is in selling to companies like Dell and Gateway, not in selling t
Re:"common sense"? (Score:2)
Is this for a specialty market? (Score:3, Insightful)
(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?
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(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)
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You need a watercooled window wrapped in noise absorbing material and vibration insulation.
Ionic cooling the way forward? (Score:1)
Doesn't the majority of the noise come from the CPU fan? I thought they were already well on their way to fixing this problem with ionic cooling [slashdot.org]
after all it's not the noise of my hard drives that bugs me, it's the noise from the CPU fan. Fix this problem and I would say the sound problem is pretty much solved.
Where's the FutureTek (TM)? (Score:1)
I'm not saying this plate isn't an improvement, but it essentially patches outdated technology by means of an added degree of complexity--which, IMHO, is not the most favorable direction to take.
Whisper (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Whisper (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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So 5 dB less than a whisper would mean less than a third the volume of a whisper.
Or for examples, see this hugetastic dB reference chart: http://www.makeitlouder.com/Decibel%20Level%20Cha
I have 20 hard drives in my PC and *I* think... (Score:2)
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
Re:I have 20 hard drives in my PC and *I* think... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm glad you are making something out of your deafness though
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I've been water cooling my hard drives for a while (Score:3, Interesting)
Mod Parent Up - liquid cooled hdd's aren't new (Score:3, Informative)
Which sounds exactly like every HDD cooling kit I've heard
Hmm... (Score:1)
Oh great.. (Score:2)
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)
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Huge pile of dead equipment from that fiasco.
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I can monitor the temperature and voltages of my home beige box but can't on any of the servers I tried at work- Dell, IBM, HP.
They were dead (Score:2)
Also these studies are probably focused on next generation HDs, which will have speeds higher than 7.2k HDs used by Google.
Water cooling never needed (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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By wrapping the drives in insulation and using water cooling to give the heat a pathway to escape, they can kill 5 decibels.
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Solid-State drives are arriving, have lightning fast access times, MTBF is becoming less of an issue, and prices are coming down.
You are the exact type of person fo
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Solid state storage will take a long time to reach the capacity and performance of hard disks for the same price.
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And if I was going to cool the videocard, I'd probably spend the money for a CPU waterblock too. Then use a 12
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Hopefully we'll see this for the higher end GeForce 8's before long.
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You have jumped into a card that is not mature and not produced as efficiently as it could be. The G71 didn't have any temperature
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I want quiet and cold drives (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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Sorry for repeating myself [slashdot.org], I just thought you'd like to know that you're doing your drives more harm than good.
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Lots of people mentioning flash drives here (Score:2)
If you used flash for desktop storage right now I suspect a big array of flash drive
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The GPP is forgetting that thumbdrives are much smaller than hard disks. You're talking about a product which has a volume (off the top of my head) about 1/20th of a 3.5" disk. Temperature is a measure of heat concentration, not power output. The power consumption for any given data volume is always going to be lower for a solid state de
Generating heat vs Dissapting Heat (Score:2)
Didn't google discover that heat isn't a big factor in hard drive reliability? [slashdot.org] This is more about moving waste heat around versus generating less of it.
I'm all for quiet, though.
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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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That's a ******* loud whisper!!
No, it's not. [wikipedia.org]
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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.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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Could be many reasons, the space requirements for large
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Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Of course, then the controller on the drive would be a lot more complicated...
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.