Water becomes the ally of hard drives
When we talk about the disadvantages of hard drives compared to SSDs, performance is always indicated or, what is the same, reading speeds. There are really other problems, such as the vibrations that they generate due to their rotation or the heat that they generate due to, precisely, the rotation. Well, they have found a solution to the temperature problem.
One can think, what heat? Sure, you think about the hard drive you have installed on your PC. But in Data Centers and servers there’s a large number of hard drives together, which generates a lot of heat. As a solution to this problem in servers, they are working on an immersion liquid cooling system.
They have published a study on this new single-phase immersion refrigeration technology. The system that they have used for the tests is a 40U rack that contains 72 HDD connected to two SAS expansion cards and NIC network nodes.
According to the data, the 72 hard drives were operating about 3 degrees lower than air systemsregardless of its position in the system. The interesting thing is that the water temperature never exceeded 40 degrees. But without a doubt, the best data is in consumption, since a 5% reduction in energy consumption with respect to an air system.
You may think “bah, only 5%”, but of course, we are talking about several thousand kilowatts (or megawatts in large Data Centers) that can mean savings of even millions of euros per year.
It’s all benefits for HDDs
Iceotope wanted to emphasize that it is a completely safe system. They highlight that the HDDs used in Data Centers use totally sealed helium chambers. This prevents coolant from seeping into the unit and damaging it.
In addition, a special liquid is used that does not conduct electricity but is very efficient in dissipating heat. Although this type of liquid is not new (I have been able to see a server system submerged in one of these liquids) it is the first time that mass storage systems have been experimented with.
At the moment, this has only been a test to see the feasibility of the project. If Meta is satisfied, it is possible to implement it in all its Data Centers. It must be said that Facebook (Meta) has large storage systems, due to the social networks it manages.