Hard drive cooling, is water cooling the best way to go?

[SirShaun]

I am looking at redesigning my machine (and i do me redesign, i have a limited space so i need to custom build the case for this space ) and my biggest concern has been for a long time the hard drives.

I run my machine 24/7 but i dont overclock so for the most part very simple air cooling has been fine in this fairly standard case but the hard drives. I have about 10 HDD (yes i know, i am asking for trouble) and would like to add more but the HDD bays as is are so close together that i dont think any air flow gets in, so when i do the design i will be looking at modular HDD cages with plenty of air space, but I have been wondering would i get better cooling from a water cooled system with HDD water blocks.

To give you an idea of how i use my machine, after a shortwhile when i start the computer up i would have about 35 firefox tabs spread out over about 12 firefox windows, dreamweaver, photoshop, bbc iplayer, itunes, a video player and heaven help me if i get into music production/mixing like i want to. End reuslt after about 2 hours the hard drives if i would touch them they would be too hot to hold for very long, (hot potato time) and i really dont want that situation to continue.

Now i know that if i am not overclocking a decent air cooling for the cpu is more than enough, but if i can get better cooling for the HDD water over air (after all you cant really overclock HDD) I would like to go for that. I guess my question is do i need to, is just getting real space between drives and a 120mm fan per 4 HDD good enough or is there a reasonable gain (in terms of performance, longevity and general crash prevention) to use a dual HDD water block per two HDDs.

suplement to that i would ask that if it is an improvement, what is the best waterblock/single fan radiator ratio.

Thank you in advance

 

[jamesriley94]

You dont really need to watercool them. If you had a high static pressure fan on the front and back of the cage, it would cool them fine. If you dont feel the airflow get through restrictive spaces, you need to look at better fans really, and it should cool them fine tbh

 

[airdeano]

welcome to the OC3D forums,
it'd be nice to know what you have in order to render some proper conclusions to your issue(s).
case, cooling, system specs, and usage.
90% of what you had listed have 5% to do with hard drive usage. more for the CPU/GPU with
all the open content. only when saving a file, scratch disk usage and pagefile storage would
be consistant on hard drive functions.

to help on the question, though depending on the actual temperatures, hard drive specs should
be between 28°-45°. keeping these in that range will extend the life of the drive. so super cooling
them is not in your best interst. monitor them with a hardware app (HWMonitor) and retest.
simply upgrading to a better fan, air-flow across the drive, or staggaring the drives in a rack can
offer simple cooling solutions to a nominal problem. but get us those specs and we can try to
elaborate a better answer.

airdeano

 

[SirShaun]

ok after much fighting with the machine and discovering that hwmonitor does not like (in fact crashes in a bad way) my ide interface card or the four ide drive that hang off it, so this attachment is without those four drives

 

[jamesriley94]

I think it likes the number 52

What fans do you have blowing on the hard drives?

 

[SirShaun]

dedicated to the hard drives themsevles? none, there is no arrangement in this case for something like that hence my desire to rebuild/redsign the case but i needed to know is there any worthwhile improvements using water cool over air cool if you are not overclocking (from what i have learnt if i were intending to overclock then it may be in my best interest to water cool ), i mean is water cooling inherently quieter, does water cooling over any real tangable benifet for the harddrives at least over a decent air gap and fan (which this case does not have at the moment). I kinda need to make that desicion about air over water because this is a not yet designed built from the ground up to fit my space and general habit of adding more and more hard drives, the case will be behind my monitors so i wont get much of a visual effect from the case (even though i will be trying to incorparte that into the design) so the aesthetic nature of water cooled would be lost most of the time, that is why i am looking for a quantitative reason, if there is a quatitative reason that water cooling is better than air cooling in the area of hard drives then i will go water cooling but if they are much the same, then i will look at air cooling

 

[jamesriley94]

Unless you're going for ridiculous clock speeds, there isnt really any point IMO.

You can achieve everything you need to on air, with the difference being not having to invest in all the WC kit. Also, you dont have the noise of the pump, which unless you're spending around 60 quid on the pump alone, you're probably going to get.

To waterblock hard drives, it'll make such a mess which will detract from any aethetics.

You're better off getting a nice quiet heatsink, and a case that allows fans to be mounted on the front and back of the hard drive cages. Hard drives dont really need excessive cooling, and having a fan or two aiding air flow over them will be sufficient enough to keep temps cool enough.