- Meta and Iceotope have demonstrated a new technique to cool down the hard drives in data centers with immersion cooling.
- The demonstration showed that it is possible to cool the HDDs with immersion cooling; the temperature variation between 72 drives was just 3 celsius degrees.
- Immersion cooling requires hard drives with helium because they are sealed; the liquid won’t be able to get inside the drive.
The immersion cooling company Iceotope is currently working on immersion cooling techniques to be used on hard drives in data centers, working with Meta. Iceotope states that this cooling solution is now achievable because of the changes in the hard drive technology.
Sealed hard drives made it possible
Immersion cooling is a cooling technique that utilizes thermally conductive but electrically insulating dielectric liquid on electronics. The electronic components are simply put in this dielectric liquid to thermally manage them. Until the helium breakthrough in HDD technology, those were just sealed to prevent dust. But now, the newest hard drives are utilizing helium gas to reduce air friction in the drive. To keep the helium gas in the drive, they have to be sealed. And this is what makes immersion cooling an option for hard drives.
Meta and Iceotope have tested this technique on a modified air-cooled, high-density storage system with 72 HDDs in a 40U rack. The results showed that the cooling was successful and the temperature variation between all those hard drives was just 3 degrees, which is not easy to achieve with air cooling solutions.
Reducing the vibrations
On top of more stable temperatures on hard drives, immersion cooling also cuts down the noise from air-based cooling solutions; and that translates into more stable hard drives because they will not be facing acoustic vibrations during their operations.
Iceotope states that this solution reduces the power required to cool the system to less than 5% of the total power consumption of the whole system. Iceotope adds,
« While precision immersion is found to be a superior alternative to air-cooling high-density disk arrays, other forms of liquid cooling including cold plates, tank immersion, or two-phase immersion, don’t preserve the operational benefits such as HDD density, user access for serviceability and ability to hot swap drives to the same degree. »