the idea of electronics being waterproof isn't exactly new I mean most Flagship
phones whether you're talking your s7s or your iPhone 7S whatever the case may
be they're designed to go bloop into the water yay look at that they survived
it's amazing okay we've all seen this before but what if you could
waterproof a computer hard
drive impractical yes
impossible let's find out
Corsair's 570x midtower case features
four tempered glass panels check it out at the link in the video description so
the first and most obvious problem we need to solve is the exposed PCB that
you'll find on the bottom of pretty much any modern hard drive if you know a
thing or two about water you'll know that while it's starts s non-electrically conductive as soon as
it starts to pick up any impurities or metal ions it quickly becomes conductive
and will cause any electronic devices that are submerged in it for long enough
to short out and or be permanently damaged so I picked myself up a can of
mg chemicals conformal coating number
419c 340g it's xylene free toine free
low vocc if you're into that sort of thing but more importantly it protects
against moisture dirt dust and apparently thermal shocks and insulates
against high voltage arcs shorts and static discharge so Step One is we are
going to treat our PCB with this stuff
okay so let's get started you grab any old hard drive you want and go to town
right wrong so most hard drives today
are actually full of good oldfashioned
air and they've got these breather ports that allow them to stay at the same
internal pressure as the atmosphere around them this is imperative for their
functionality and this is actually the reason why even when you submerge them
in a non-conductive fluid like a mineral oil cooled computer we have a build blog
that you can check out here where we actually explained all of this they
would still cease to work because through these breather ports the mineral
oil or any other fluid would seep in and Gunk up the internals of the hard drive
but there's been a recent development in hard drive technology that leads me to
believe that perhaps we could run a
drive submerged in fluid this is a
Seagate Barracuda Pro it is a helium
filed drive now the point of helium filled drives was more efficient
operation since helium is less dense than air so when you're spinning the
spindles around there's less resistance but it also means they had to seal the
insides of the drives because if the helium got out then you would lose the
benefit right so this is the drive that I will be using 99% isopropyl
alcohol and
bloop don't worry kids this is definitely safe I've done this many
times I'm a professional now let's make
ourselves somewhere to spray cuz I think the spray booth is over in the on the
other side I have to assume this stuff wouldn't be very good to inhale
so don't
breathe okay check this out so I sprayed
the crap out of it like it is pretty
pretty gooped on there and uh it's
actually like built up around the outsides of these chips so what I'm
hoping is we have achieved the water resistance that we need and done so
without damaging the ability of this thing to make contact with the places it
has to so this is where it gets really
sketch well those are all definitely
worn so we're going to reinstall
this on the hard drive and test it
outside before we try to put it in the water
mhm mhm H
mhm so it's possible that the painting that I did on
the PCB covered up these metal contacts
for data and power so we're just going to give it the old have you tried
unplugging it and plugging it back in
repeatedly try and scrape those connectors
clean that does seem to be making a difference I don't know if you can see
that close up there but you can see the conformal coating is uh
coming up I don't even think it's spinning
up H yeah this drive is definitely not
powered up okay so it's a power issue we can work with
that let's get out the old
scraper just go at it a bit more aggressively here can't imagine just
spraying conformal coating on it would have destroyed it found the problem
there were three contact points under here I didn't sand the ones for power
for the motor so of course it's not spinning
up let's go ahead and give that the old
you know hard drive sanding
technique yes okay there it is there's our 10 tbte
Drive okay
so it's
time time for what time to figure out um
what data I can copy for a test I am
basically going to take the drive and
put it in we're going to see what
happens what the hell is this okay so
it's some kind of land issue I will deal with that later in the
meantime I've got a USB type-c
Ethernet adapter here and I've have started three
transfers each of like 2.3 terabytes
worth of data so you can see here we are
transferring to the adventure drive from
the network so this should take quite some time now this is where it gets real
so I'm going to take this
drive which is currently right data and ever so
carefully cautiously and not at all
recklessly oh this pains
me I'm actually in pain right
now okay I am liquid
cooling the hard
drive okay I'm halfway in
in about 3/4 of the way
in is it still
transferring still going let's go get some more
water okay so to absolutely
prove that there's no smoke in mirrors that's not mineral
oil here's a new ug look tap water tap
water
AF let's top it up still
transferring but don't take the camera off me we're proving this is a continuous shot here we go okay tap
water AF there goes the power
connector and the drive is submerged
still transfering
no okay so let's get the moisture I think the power shorted I think that's
what happened here uhoh I don't know what effect alcohol has on the conformal
cating um did not think that
through okay so it's been Popp in kind
of in and out of being detected um I think it's to do with the
power connector but quite honestly see
here if we try again now boom it's transferring get now it's gone I don't
know what we were trying to prove anyway putting it in water because it has no
real practical application so let's just go get some
mineral oil so I found all the mineral oil from
the mineral oil PC I sincerely hope that I'm not going
to make a mess here but as you guys know I'm allergic
to funnels so uh the Chan is seem pretty
good here we go
sh wonderful now
okay so here we go can it handle mineral oil I want to
see a longer sustained transfer here kids that's what I want to see so you
saw it here first
folks liquid cooled hard
drive hopefully my editors have found some way to turn what's happened in the
last half an hour or so into some kind of coherent narrative and hopefully you
guys enjoyed it if you aren't familiar with mass drop they're the community
where users discuss products that they're interested in buying and then
Mast drop talks to the manufacturer and negotiates a bulk order at a discounted
price and they're Now featuring featuring a drop for the high-fi man re
IM they have 9mm Dynamic drivers and
they ship with two pairs of silicone ear tips and they're only about $35 which is
pretty sweet so check them out and other drops at the link in the video description down below thanks for
watching this video If You disliked it you know what to do but if you liked it hit that like button get subscribed
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Amazon where you can buy stuff like what we featured in the video like I don't
know maybe this 10 TB hard drive that apparently can run
under not water but non-conductive fluid
now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so check out our
video oh excuse me my throat our video
on the desk PC that you see right here part three the conclusion is up and
ready for your viewing enjoyment