Cooling hdds in mineral oil

[CryoByte]

I have a server PC with 6 hdd and I was wondering if cooling them with mineral oil would be a good ideia. The main point would be to lower the noise, but improved thermals would also be a plus.

I have 1 6TB drive that probably is not a helium drive and therefore would not be cooled this way, but the rest of them are helium drives. Any thoughts?

Also, do you think i would be able to do this without a pump and radiator? Just letting the mineral oil absorve the heat and release it passively.

[Levent]

1 minute ago, CryoByte said:

if cooling them with mineral oil would be a good ideia.

absolutely not.

[CryoByte]

Just now, Levent said:

absolutely not.

Any reason why?

[RollinLower]

3 minutes ago, CryoByte said:

Any reason why?

well, like you mentioned the non-helium drive would just drown in the stuff.

 

but you are not the first one to have an idea like this, META also did it as a proof of concept once and it does work: https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/01/iceotope_immersion_hard_drives/

[freeagent]

Just get a fan. Problem solved.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

17 minutes ago, RollinLower said:

well, like you mentioned the non-helium drive would just drown in the stuff.

 

but you are not the first one to have an idea like this, META also did it as a proof of concept once and it does work: https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/01/iceotope_immersion_hard_drives/

Reason its not a good idea is just cost, the mess it makes, the thing becomes a massive pain to move around, and leakage risk

 

13 minutes ago, freeagent said:

Just get a fan. Problem solved.

^^^

Get some fans and some sound deadening and youll be good

[CryoByte]

11 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

Reason its not a good idea is just cost, the mess it makes, the thing becomes a massive pain to move around, and leakage risk

 

^^^

Get some fans and some sound deadening and youll be good

I was thinking of just getting these hard drive cages and put it in a small aquarium, hopefully it wouldn't be too messy.

The temperatures are mostly fine, usually around 40 degrees C and the case already has some sound dampening.

[Levent]

16 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

Reason its not a good idea is just cost, the mess it makes, the thing becomes a massive pain to move around, and leakage risk

 

Absolutely not the reason. Mineral oil is known to kill hardware.

[CryoByte]

9 minutes ago, Schnoz said:

Those are all valid reasons, but not the biggest reason. Mineral oil will absolutely degrade many rubbers and plastics over time. For something as sensitive as your data, you do not want to take that risk.

If i'm not mistaken helium drives are welden shut, i doubt that mineral oil would go through that.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

13 minutes ago, Schnoz said:

Those are all valid reasons, but not the biggest reason. Mineral oil will absolutely degrade many rubbers and plastics over time. For something as sensitive as your data, you do not want to take that risk.

So basically its as bad as glycol or isopropyl and degrades all your plastics?

 

I guess proper submersion cooling would need novec but that stuff its expensive asf

[CryoByte]

11 minutes ago, Schnoz said:

Furthermore, liquids can transmit vibrations quite well, as with that party trick where smacking the top of a filled glass bottle will blow out the bottom. HDDs are very sensitive to vibration, so having them all transmit vibrations between each other, echoing against themselves and the walls of the aquarium is likely a profoundly bad idea.

Hmm, I hadn't considered this. I wonder how much of an impact those vibrations would have. Expecially since usually hdd are mounted on plastic and metal pieces that trasmit vibrations better.

 

[OhioYJ]

Just some air flow across them will keep them plenty cool. Pretty much all my PCs, my HDD sit 30 C +/- a few degrees all the time. My NAS started out with 8 drives in it, now it has 16. All my PCs, use the same setup, a fan on both sides of the drive. They don't even have to be high speed fans, slow quiet fans are fine:

 

My original NAS setup:

 

 

Same thing, but with 16 drives:

 

 

Even my regular builds, I've used 80mm fans to get a fan on the oppposite side of the HDD cage:

 

 

Just some air flow, it will keep your hard drives, plenty cool.

 

 

[CryoByte]

2 minutes ago, Schnoz said:

Yep. I'm not in the mood to set up something in ANSYS Workbench to properly test HDD vibrations in mineral oil, but I assure you the effects aren't going to be super swell lol.

 

One more thing! The mineral oil will degrade not only the PCB of the drive, but also the seal around the connectors for the HSA (read/write arm) and spindle motor, which will result in fluid penetration into the sterile enclosure. You can say goodbye to your data in that case.

Really, even with helium drives?? Mineral oil goes through the welds??

[CryoByte]

3 minutes ago, OhioYJ said:

Just some air flow across them will keep them plenty cool. Pretty much all my PCs, my HDD sit 30 C +/- a few degrees all the time. My NAS started out with 8 drives in it, now it has 16. All my PCs, use the same setup, a fan on both sides of the drive. They don't even have to be high speed fans, slow quiet fans are fine:

 

My original NAS setup:

 

 

Same thing, but with 16 drives:

 

 

Even my regular builds, I've used 80mm fans to get a fan on the oppposite side of the HDD cage:

 

 

Just some air flow, it will keep your hard drives, plenty cool.

 

 

Cooling is not the actual problem I'm trying to fix, it's more the noise.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

5 minutes ago, Schnoz said:

While glycol is messy, it doesn't degrade plastic

In that case its fine to run antifreeze through a waterloop? 

 

Gotta mitigate galvanic corrosion somehow when im mixing an aluminum car rad and a copper block

[DoctorNick]

1 hour ago, CryoByte said:

I have a server PC with 6 hdd and I was wondering if cooling them with mineral oil would be a good ideia. The main point would be to lower the noise, but improved thermals would also be a plus.

I have 1 6TB drive that probably is not a helium drive and therefore would not be cooled this way, but the rest of them are helium drives. Any thoughts?

Also, do you think i would be able to do this without a pump and radiator? Just letting the mineral oil absorve the heat and release it passively.

Instead just do this:

 

[manikyath]

no, just no.

 

even if just for the sake that swapping a hard drive would require stripping the labels and a multi stage sanitation process both for the new and old drive.

 

past that.. yes your drives might enjoy some forced air.. at most. submersion cooling is so overkill it's honestly ridiculous. it's also largely uncertain if the seals on the drive will actually survive in mineral oil.

38 minutes ago, CryoByte said:

Really, even with helium drives?? Mineral oil goes through the welds??

the drives arent welded shut afaik, the lid is still mounted with some form of sealant around the edge.

 

there's also a bunch of passtrough points where data and power travels from the outside to the inside, which indeed in a helium drive are fully sealed off, but if that material is resistant to mineral oil is not a fiven.

 

also.. you dont reduce noise with mineral oil, because you still need to vent that heat somehow, you still need radiators with fans, and a pump to circulate all that oil. you're basicly adding the sound of an aquarium to the sound of your server.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

5 hours ago, Schnoz said:

Antifreeze is not the best for a watercooling loop, but if you dilute it a bit you should be fine.

 

 

Ohhhhhh. I'm not sure how well antifreeze would handle that, given that car radiators and engine blocks are made out of the same material so there's not much potential for corrosion. I strongly recommend switching to a copper radiator, and if you really want a big radiator, use a MO-RA or something. You do not want to have corrosion as even a remotely possible issue.

I mean cars usually have mix metal cooling solutions afaik

 

And no id rather not pay for an overpriced copper rad be it a niche product like the mo-ra nor pathetic pc rads that cant cool for shit, especially given the price of car radiators, though if copper radiators that arent used for niche stuff like pcs are available then sure id go for those if they arent horrifically expensive or miniscule and cant cool for shit like pc rads

 

For the price of those expensive niche products id rather buy a used ac unit for the 40-60$ thatd cost me and build a cpu block as an evap which will obliterate any ambient cooling solutions including the beefy car rad, since the whole point of going with a car rad is to build a dirt cheap <50$ total waterloop that has a pretty good cooling capacity

 

 

Maybe the solution here would be to elctroplate the copper with something that doesnt have a galvanic corrosion risk like nickel or just outright replace the block with an aluminum one

 

Since this will still make good content ill problably finish it some time but after that ill problably move on to phase change