Cooling Dry Ice / CO2 Simple Cooling without Condensation

I'm running a old P3 as a file server in my attic. I'm worried about my expensive hard drive setup (almost 1TB) during the summers though as the temperatures up there can easily reach over 100 deg F. I could move the server but that would be a hassle to have to rewire it twice a year. Since I have easy access to dry ice (doesn't cost me anything) I was thinking of just putting the case in a cooler full of the stuff and refilling it every couple of days. I'm worried about the condensation though. Any thoughts on this guys?

 

I suppose if you had the entire system air tight and surround with dry-ice the condensation wouldn't be a problem. Although you'd have no air flow you'd have static chilled air inside, although on second thought convection will take place but it will cool and recirculate so that could possibly work...

Wouldn't an air-conditioner be more sensible?

JCBeastie

 

Um yeah air conditioner. And if you put it in a sealed box it wouldn't ventilate the co2 or dry ice either so it will eventually reach room temp or higher. Or more likely blow up. Ever put dry ice in a soda bottle and close it fun stuff. But with your harddrives in it might be bad. I say air conditioner or if you really want to do that dry ice thing. enclose your server and then surround it with the dry ice. So the co2 can excape also watch out if your in the room a lot that you don't displace the room's air with co2. Cause then you will die and you won't even notice. So check on that but yeah if you really want to use dry ice enclose your server then surround it with dry ice.

 

Just cross ventilate the attick. It should keep your house cooler and will keep the pc cooler as well. You could also water cool with a rad in a cooler room or outside under a shade.

 

Ha I love the "you will die and not even notice" but I thought that you do hyperventilate in a high CO2 environment? Maybe you were thinking of CO, carbon monoxide, which has a more systemic effect by binding to your hemoglobin rather than just displacing O2. Anyway, enough biology and onto thermodynamics (?)

Since the insulation in the attic is poor running an AC would be expensive and inefficient (Here in the US George Bush and the oil companies make lots of money because our inefficiency). Venting the attic would require me drilling some big holes which is eventually what I'm gonna probably do.

One option though would be to take short copper pipes and stick them in front of the fans (sort of a cooled air vent). Then surround them in small styrofoam boxes full of dry ice. That would cool the air going through the case but not so cold as to cause condensation. (?) Again not the most efficient setup but certainly cheap. My question though is would the air get cold enough?

 

oh ffs stop with the "dry ice" crap. You'd go broke fast paying for it, and don't you think the INSIDE of the tubes would get condensation and fling little balls of water at your drives? Just use dual forward 120s (HIGH speed, nobody will hear), a rear 120, and a top one...

 

FFS read the OP! He gets dry ice for free...

But, OT, I don't think dry ice is a viable option to cool something for long. Because it will melt, and you have to replace it. So if you like going to the attic every hour to top up the dry ice container, then it might work... If it is really that bad, go for watercooling, with a huge rad and massive airflow (sound isn't a factor I recon), so that the temps stay near ambient.

 

Hmm... here's an idea, why not use the dry ice to cool some water? CO2 and Air (mostly nitrogen) has pretty crappy thermal capacity, so the cold from the dry ice won't last very long. Water on the other hand has excellent thermal capacity.

It's quite simple really, all you need container full of water that you can rest your HDs on or mount them to the side of. Then just dump the dry ice into the water (and make sure there's a vent in the container). You'll get a nice constant bubbling mist around as a plus

The dry ice will cool the water (will freeze it), and the cool water will cool your HDs. Need a significantly large container of water for this to prevent condensation (large enough so that the tub doesn't freeze over), preferrably plastic (which won't conduct very well, but metal containers will condense).

However, your original idea might work better in terms of getting the most bang per block of dry ice, If you get a couple blocks of dry ice, should last you 24 hours (I've seen blocks of ice in the lab last for a couple days just in a cooler). I don't think you'll have to worry too much about condensation as long as you have an air tight seal in your cooler and it's closed most of the time (you ever seen condensation in a dry ice cooler? because I sure haven't. The CO2 displaces all the moisture laiden air out of the container since it's heavier and basically prevents condensation). Make like a rack on the lid of the cooler to hold your HDs over the dry ice at a bit of a distance (~1ft). You might run into other problems if it's too close to the dry ice (materials contract if you get it THAT cold, and might run into spindle sticking issues). Not sure how you'll handle all the wiring since you do want a tight seal to prevent air from getting in and causing ice to form. CO2 asphyxiation is also a problem and might also give you nose tickling (like when you burp after drinking soda). Attach a hose to the drain of the cooler, and sticking the hose out the window should take care of that though.

But all this is really complicated just to cool some HDs. Maybe the attic is the problem? Can you move it to your basement?

 

So he does. Still, the idea doesn't seem as good as putting some wee holes in the wall and having external car rad WCing.

 

I think a using cooler and free blocks of dry ice is waaaayyy cheaper than getting a car rad, a pump, tubing, fittings, water blocks for HD's and whatever else you need for WCing (fittings by themselves can cost a pretty penny). I think if douphus had money to blow on all that, he'd just as well go get an AC, hang it on the attic window and pay for the electric bill for the few months he needs it.

 

A long-term, reliable and low maintenance solution needs to be simple. Dry ice is not the way to go. You'd have to top up the CO2 every other day at least, and I'm not at all sure that your HDDs are designed to deal with such low temperatures (or such sudden temperature fluctuations when you top the system up). Would it not be better, as was suggested, to have a nice cross-flow of air through the attic? If you add watercooling to that, make sure you use the biggest-ass rad going and use an Eheim pump for 100% zero-intervention reliability, unless you have a flow switch/sensor hooked to a shutdown circuit.

 

I dont think the dry ice is a good idea... I think there will be condensation problems, wich are not easy to fix.

If you got some spare cash (or want to save money to make the system reliable) you could go for a SATA RAID5 controller with Hotswap Bay (like the Adaptec 2410SA + Hotswap kit) and some Maxtor Maxline or Western Digital Caviar RE/SE/SE2 disks.
Those disks are server disks, built to work under extreme conditions like high temperatures, high vibration and dust. They are also adapted to work better in RAID systems, and have a MTTF of a milion hours (as opposed to 50K hours of normal disks) with a 5 year warranty.
The controller I've mentioned supports Online Capacity Expansion and Hotswap, so if a disk fails, you can replace it while the system is running without losing data.

If you don't know how RAID 5 works, i'll explain.
All data is chopped up into as many bits as there are disks in the system, minus one.
So if you make a 4 drive RAID5 array, there wll be 3 blocks of data.
The controller calculates a CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) block from the 3 data blocks, and writes that to the 4th disk.
If one of the drives fails, and you replace it, the controller will reverse the calculation and write the results to the new disk. That result is exactly the same as the data you "lost" when the drive crashed.

That calculation works like this. It calculates in binary, but i'll use a decimal example.
disk1 + disk2 + disk3 = CRC saved on disk4
15+20+5 = 40
If the 2nd drive crashes you'll get this:
15+?+5 = 40
So the questionmark can be recalulated like this:
40 - (15 + 5) = 20

The only disadvantage of RAID5 is that you'll lose an amount of storage space for CRC data. This amount equals the storage space of one disk in the array, so if you use more disks the percentage of "lost" storagespace decreases.
Also, you'll need disks that are about the same size. You can mix brands etc, but if you put a 20, 40 and 80GB disk toghether, only 20GB of all disks will be used (so thats half of the 40GB and a quarter of the 80GB disk).

 

Here is my 2 cents... I really think that anyone poopoo'n the idea has never used dry ice before. It will not sublimate in hours it will take days depending on the size of the block used. Plus it's free to the originator...bonus!!

I've used dry ice to keep food frozen on camping trips. I've had a 5lb block keep food frozen in a cooler for a week. That's with opening it once a day to get food out. Mind you the food wasn't generating heat of it's own like the pc will. I think setting things up to test will be cheap to see how long the dry ice can keep it cool.

You will need a chest cooler large enough for the pc and the dry ice. It's recommended to put the ice in a cardboard box or something to isolate it from the cooler wall. any inbound cables will need to run through the cooler and sealed with some RTV. It would also be useful to be able to start the pc without opening the chest.

One thing that could ruin your rig is condensation. If you allow the pc and cooler to chill before initially powering it up, it will lower that risk. You really would not have a risk of it exploding, but if you want to be careful...set up a air lock like is used in winemaking (fill it with mineral oil or something). it will release the pressure and not allow fresh humid air to enter. The enviroment inside the chest will be at a higher pressure so air leaks should not let air in.

In anycase...I'm an optimist. I'd like to see if it works. Try it with a junk PC first and see how things run.

 

No, but they do know a little bit about PC cooling.

 

Car Rad from a scrapper: Cheap.
Fittings: .60 each from your local hardware shop
Tubing: .33/Foot, again from your local shop.
Water blocks (Most expensive part). $20 of copper sheet. $8 of pipe. $2 of elbows. Braze it after drilling.
Pump: Keep the system on the same level, and use a cheap pond humper.
That's what, $60?

 

What kind of harddisks are you using? Most IDE/SATA drives are ok upto about 45C (115F?), and a hotter for SCSI.

If you're worried about protecting data, using a high risk cooling system does not strike me as a good idea.

I don't know what your current case is like, but one solution would be to invest in a case with better cooling, and where you can spread the hdd's out a bit. A couple of manually added 120mm fans to keep things moving maybe. Not sure about form factor for P3 though so there may not be a lot of cases out there. Maybe someone else can help you with that.

Watercooling is going to be more expensive, but that's to be expected. Also, it depends on how precious your data really is, because you might not be happy about the idea of having water so close to something that important.

You could of course save yourself some money and just move the whole thing somewhere cooler, and leave it there.

I think that the risk of condensation from using dry ice is too great, but like I said, it depends on how precious your data really is. I'd also be concerned about the buildup of CO2 in your attic. In reply to what someone else said, I'm pretty sure that big temperature fluctuation would kill harddrives :/ so you'd have to be careful of that too. Dry ice will also require filling up fairly frequently, so you'd have to think of something if you went away for a few days.

 

P3 desktop computers use normal ATX spec.
ATX has been there since the Pentium 2.
P2 systems have been available in ATX and AT formfactor, and from the P3 and up you can only get ATX style.
The only thing there wasn't around that time is colored connectors on the mobo (like, lime for sound, blue for VGA, purple for keyboard and green for mouse. It was all black back then)

Anyway, if the data is important, i'd get some server disks instead of ordinary home computer disks. So go for Maxline or Caviar RE/SE/SE2 disks.
They are made for working in bad conditions and have a much higher life expectancy than normal disks, and will only cost you 5 bucks more, over normal disks of the same specification.
Getting a larger case and some fans should help a lot too, to keep the temperature down.

 

By the way it is deadly in large quantities same reason helium is deadly in large quantities. you don't notice that your out of oxygen or air cause your still breathing so that impulse is satisfied. But your not getting any oxygen. It isn't deadly cause it is a chemical it is just deadly because it is tricking your body into thinking its breathing and you die because your brain and mucles aka heart and lungs die cause of lack of oxygen. I have a friend that had that happen to him with helium baloons and breathing them in too much. He has permanent brain damage but he survived.

The put fans in the attic combined with decent air cooling system should do just fine. Its only a lot of harddrives. They don't generate that much heat. Be more worried about heat build up in the attic from the heat rising from the house. So put some of those big ass ventilating fans and you will be fine.

 

I know this isn't as sexy as all the above, but why not just move the whole thing to the basement/somewhere where the day time temps won't soar in the summer. The thermal changes from day to night, summer to winter are by far more dangerouse to your setup then the dry ice wil ever be to your health. Find a cool dark corner and set it up there. Constant low temps will be a far better solution then anything you can set up in the attic.

 

The idea of dry ice cooling has been bugging me for a while now , as I too have access to it.
My idea was to put dry ice in some kind of container that would be attached to radiators that in their turn would cool the air going through them. However, it does not seem like a good permanent solution, as you would have to constantly refill the container. If this setup itself (without ice in it) would do the trick of running the system at its normal operating temperatures, then yeah. Dry ice in this situation would be a kind of a performance booster. But having it as a crucial part of the whole set up – no!
A lesson of chemistry: Phase change depends on two factors: pressure and temperature. Since pressure stays almost the same, then it’s the temperature that plays the key role. Dry ice may stay in a solid state for a while in a cooler with food in it. But let’s not forget that a cooler is made to keep cold temperatures in and not to let heat inside. A computer on the other hand (as we all know) generates heat. Therefore dry ice would sublime very fast, leaving you with nothing. Constantly adding it would be a pain in the rear, and you’d give up very fast.
Dry ice water cooling?

You're right, Lemur 6, water will freeze. Imagine how large a tub would have to be. The whole thing would be so bulky. And going back to what’s being said, adding ice all the time would get old very quickly.
And the idea of dumping the whole thing into a box with dry ice in it. there will be so much condensation in a moment, you won't even peep, your system will be a pile of metal.
What’s my advice in this case? A set up of powerful fans. They would make temperatures just fine for your HDs to run.
Could get noisy? A set of ear plugs or good headphones! Just don’t turn on Celine Dion too loud.