Watercooling NAS ?

[ZILoBeast]

Hello people,

As I read in some forums, some consider a so called "Bitumenbox" (Sorry, I came from Germany so I don't know if this term is also known in English.
And 'cause I want to use HDDs for my DIY-NAS I consider to buy or built such boxes but I ave a few questions about this (thought maybe somebody has some experience with it)

So first question is, does this really help to reduce the noise of my HDDs ? (I'm going to use IronWolf 8 TB OR WD Red 8 TB) ?

Second question - I think this Is going to be hotter than without boxes, so is there a possibility to water-cool the Hard drives ?

Aaand last question - some advices for the case which also dams the Noise and maybe helps to cool the system ?

Thank you...

 

[pricklypunter]

I think you need to get a battle plan together for what exactly you want to achieve, lay out your hardware requirements and what you plan on or hope to be able to do with it etc

The Bitumen Box for damping noise, manufactured from stable sheets of the stuff that had been air dried and coated to remove the smell. I heard of it being done by gamers a while back, but never seen any in use, and certainly not in a server environment. The results were mixed as I recall, some claimed it took the edge off drive whine, other said it made them near silent. Either way, having a hard disk in a closed box without proper airflow is going to cause it to run warm, even if you do have the thermal coupling effect of the bitumen, so I would advise against doing it. Water cooling the hard disks, an interesting thought, but honestly you would be much better off using isolating rubber mounts and large, slow spinning fans to dampen and cool them imo.

As to using which disks, I would choose the WD's over the Seagate's any day. You might also consider using the HGST HE8, perhaps a little more expensive, but worth the investment. The case that you choose will ultimately be based around which mainboard you are planning on fitting in it, how many disks, wiring space, power supply requirements etc. Generally though, you will want something that can hold the number of disks you plan on using initially, with a couple of spare bays at least, for expansion. You'll also want the case to be large enough to be able to fit large slow spinning fans and have as straight an airflow path as possible through each zone. Obviously you need to power the thing and everything needs cables, so room for those too must be considered