15K RPM SAS Drive submerged in oil

[Lord Nicoll]

Generally, I'd agree that drives shouldn't be submerged in oil, but over the past week I've been looking at how other people have managed to get drives to work submerged. However those drives are normal 7200 RPM SATA ones, where as I want to submerged whole rack servers in oil (as in the whole cabinet in a container) and obviously with the drivers in the front of most of the servers I already own or plan to get, I have to question reliability of high RPM drives under oil even when prepared, these drives will probably be used 24/7 so thermal expansion and contraction won't be my main issue, more will they fail faster. It looks like a massive pain but simply being I can't have the noise of those fans running on air, they're simply too noisy, so under oil the machines should be a lot quieter, I could just put more insulation to quell the noise, and indeed that from a price view alone is vastly more effective, but then I'd need fans, vents, acoustic chambers and filters, and then becomes almost as much as a pain. My ultimate question, does anyone have any idea how reliable drives are under oil? Obviously RAID can only do so much, and I don't want to have to replace these drivers all time, that would get expensive. 

[unijab]

SSDs are quiet

[Inception9269]

Going off of Linus' video where he does just that, it would have to be a completely sealed drive like one of Seagates helium filled drives. With hard drives if any fluid gets inside of it, it will pretty much ruin the drive. Disks are meant to spin with as little resistance as possible, so if water were to enter it then that'd pretty much kill it

[Lord Nicoll]

2 minutes ago, unijab said:

SSDs are quiet

The HDD noise isn't the problem, 12 6000 RPM fans on the U1 and 6 5000 RPM fans on the U2 and 4 5000 RPM fans on the U4 servers I'm thinking of buying are the problem. SSD's are kinda expensive when you need to buy 20 of them, and if I do buy more servers that is going to get even worse. Not to mention SMART recording doesn't work right with SATA drives on the SAS controllers, but SAS drives have that better interface that lets them report drive condition even over RAID controllers. Both air and oil have their own problems, I guess it will come down to the day I start working on the new server room. I'll probably go with air as reliability is very important to me, but keeping noise down will be as much of a challenge I think. 

[Lord Nicoll]

3 minutes ago, Inception9269 said:

Going off of Linus' video where he does just that, it would have to be a completely sealed drive like one of Seagates helium filled drives. With hard drives if any fluid gets inside of it, it will pretty much ruin the drive. Disks are meant to spin with as little resistance as possible, so if water were to enter it then that'd pretty much kill it

That's a good point, some of the SAS drives I have are helium filled, and I know they're sealed but they cost a lot more, but that's an option alright. Water would ruin any PC long before it got into the drives lol, 

*edit* Holy fuck that will work, but damn, those drives will cost more than the servers themselves to upgrade too. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/11/08/helium-hard-drive-using-immersion-cooling/

 

[sotiris.bos]

Do you have any idea how much the oil will cost you? It could be as much as scrapping the idea and buying SSDs.

EDIT: A "19 inch rack" I found is 24 inches wide, 73.5 inches tall and 36.5 inches deep. That equates to 264 US Gallons of volume. Say you have to fill a 1/3 of it with oil (you probably need more), that means you need 88 gallons of mineral oil. The recommended oil by Puget systems (an oil cooled case which Linus featured) is 225 dollars per 12 gallons aka 1650 dollars for 88 gallons of mineral oil. Can your floor support the weight of the thing? That oil case also featured a radiator with fans to cool the oil.

[Lord Nicoll]

16 minutes ago, sotiris.bos said:

Do you have any idea how much the oil will cost you? It could be as much as scrapping the idea and buying SSDs.

EDIT: A "19 inch rack" I found is 24 inches wide, 73.5 inches tall and 36.5 inches deep. That equates to 264 US Gallons of volume. Say you have to fill a 1/3 of it with oil (you probably need more), that means you need 88 gallons of mineral oil. The recommended oil by Puget systems (an oil cooled case which Linus featured) is 225 dollars per 12 gallons aka 1650 dollars for 88 gallons of mineral oil. Can your floor support the weight of the thing? That oil case also featured a radiator with fans to cool the oil.

I would be using a 42U rack chassis, I looked into it and for a local supper, anything over 1000 litres (by time I would have filled up the cooling system which would have been used car radiators, lots of them) is only €.50 per litre, so about €750. SAS SSD's aren't cheap, but you don't need all the extra reporting features for an SSD. The floor of the structure I plan to use (a workshop in my garden) can support about 5 tons, with oil being lighter than water, there will barely be 1.2 tons of oil, Add the mass of the rack, tank (which I can make from 2mm plate steel and some support ribs) the whole unit would be about 3 tons there or abouts. As it stands a 42U rack chassis fully loaded with servers will be like 500 Kg, as even a U1 server is almost 10Kg, they look light but aren't, my ones alone have 3 layers of sheet steel keeping their rigidity.