Project Argobox

Status: Completed

Period: Summer of 2006

Participants: James Ma, Cedric Daros

Description: Create an oil submerged computer

Introduction:

The objective of this project was to build a computer case that would let us dunk an entire computer in mineral oil.  This isn’t the first time that this has been done.  A Google search for “mineral oil pc” shows some interesting results; mostly wiki articles and forum topics. There are some commercial solutions out there as well, notably one from Puget and one from Hardcore Computers.  You can check out Puget’s Youtube video here.  Tom’s Hardware made their own mineral oil PC in 2007 as well. Puget’s website is definitely worth a look, they have a lot of detailed performance analysis and their Youtube video acts as a nice demo of the whole rig is set up.  Puget even sells kits that let you make your own mineral oil computer rig (computer not included).  The rig offered by Hardcore Computers is new to me.  Their solution looks a lot cooler and a lot less messier (more on that later), so if you have $5000 to burn, you can have your own decked out mineral oil computer ready to go too!

Regardless of what commercial solutions are available, Cedric and I wanted to try to do this on our own.  We had a few PCs in our possession that we had no use for, and this seemed like the perfect project to keep us busy for a summer.

Motivation:

So, practically speaking, why the hell would you want to submerge your computer in mineral oil?

1. The Coolness Factor: Quite frankly the mere fact that you can submerge an entire computer in a liquid and get away with it should be reason enough to attempt such an insane feat.  However, for those who are unbelievers, there’s also the fact that…
2. It actually makes the computer cooler: Our research showed that rigs like these are not uncommon with giant servers who’s cost is on the scale of Zimbabwe’s GDP.  The oil will theoretically cool every component on the motherboard at once, lowering the overall temperature on the computer.  And as we all know, computers love to operate at lower temperatures.

Design:

Hard Drives:

It wasn’t long before we encountered our first problem.  We very quickly found out that hard disk drives absolutely CANNOT be submerged in oil.  The reason for this is because the head of a hard drive’s arm relies on air pressure to stay above the platters when the disk rotates.   If we completely submerge the hard disk in oil, the arm would most likely just scratch the hell out of the disk, destroying any data sectors along with it.  Also, we also had to take into consideration that oil is significantly more viscous than air.  By completely submerging a hard drive in oil, would be increasing the amount of resistance on the hard disk’s arm when it needs to move back and forth to do reads/writes.  This will severely increase the possibility of hard drive failure.

We had two possible solutions to this problem, either try to duct tape and epoxy the hell out of our hard drives to make them water/oil proof, or just place the hard drive outside of the case.  The problem with the first option is that its real pain to do, and also we have no way to ensure the proper functionality of the hard drive after we sealed them up.  The second option made a lot more sense, it didn’t require any modifications to the hard drives themselves, and all we would  need were super long IDE cables.

In retrospect, the simplest solution would be to use SSD hard drives.  SSD harddrives do not have any moving parts, so they be submerged in oil.  But they aren’t exactly cheap, not yet anyways.

Case Construction:

Once we had decided that the hard drives would not be placed in the case itself, we had to figure out what to use as a case.  Initially, we wanted to keep it simple and use a fish tank aquarium, so we went to PetSmart to go aquarium shopping.  We soon realized that there were two essential flaws to our plan: the tanks that we saw  did not fit our initial motherboard and power supply space requirements, and the tanks themselves were not reinforced at the joints.  Our biggest concern was on the second point; the combined weight of the computer components and the mineral oil might be too much for the epoxy to hold in.  So, as we left PetSmart, we began to mull over various designs for our custom case.

After much discussion, we decided the best way to make the case was to make a plexi-glass box that is reinforced with a steel frame.

Here are some poorly drawn pictures to help illustrate the design:

Clear Plexiglass box

First, we’ll cut panels of clear Plexiglas to size and glue them together to form a box.  Because the dimensions needed to be exact, we used the milling machines at Cedric’s shop to cut the Plexiglas to size.  We used generic crazy-glue to glue all the parts into the box shape.  Once the crazy-glue set, we used clear silicone sealant (the kind you use in bath rooms) and sealed both the inside and the outside edges of the box.

Steel Frame Reinforcements

Next, we cut out reinforcing frames using steel.  The diagram that I drew is pretty incomplete, but you should be able to get a vague idea of what we did from this diagram and from the pictures of the case (if you haven’t figure it out by now, clicking on the image of the case at the top of the article will take you to a Flickr feed with more pictures).  The steel frame was constructed so that it would fit around the Plexiglas box like a glove; and it did!  Again, we used plenty of crazy glue and silicone sealant to close up the edges between the steel frame and the plexiglass box.

The steel frame portion of the case also has an L-bar all around the top, this serves to enhance the overall strength of the case and to give the case nifty little handles!

Once we were done with the gluing and the silicone-ing, we spray-painted the steel portions of the case black, leaving us plenty of clear windows to look into the case.

Placement of Components:

If you look carefully at the pictures, the placement is not too complex.  The PSU sits at the very bottom of the tank, with the main power plug snaking out through the top of the tank.  The motherboard is actually “dipped” into the tank and held up by two plastic placers that go across the top of the tank.  The hardest part of the rig was setting up the hard drives because they must sit outside of the tank.  However, the IDE ports on the motherboard itself were located on the lowest point of the motherboard, so looking for a set of IDE cables that were long enough posed quited a problem.  You should have seen the look on the face of the sales representitive at Canada Computers when I asked for help.  He thought I was insane!

Once everything is set up and plugged in, make absolutely sure that you don’t need to move or change anything around.  I found this out the hard way.  Once you start filling the tank with mineral oil, it becomes one hell of a sticky mess to bring stuff out, dry them, swap components, and place them back.

Running It:

Actually, there were no problems whatsoever running it.  I made sure that the computer itself was running Ubuntu before I submerged it in oil.  I turned on the comptuer before submerging it in oil to make sure that everything worked and was running before hand.  Once I made sure that everything was working, I turned everything off and began filling the tank with minearl oil.

Surprisingly, everything still worked when I turned the computer back on, and look Mom! exposed CPU!

However, everything was not well with the computer, here are a few points that I came across:

• This thing is messy as hell.  Oil can not be cleaned up easily like water.  You’re going to end up ruining quite a few rags on the cleanup
• The computer still runs pretty hot.  Sure, things are nice and cool for a while, but eventually, without circulation, the oil starts to heat up and passive heat exchange from the oil to the air just doesn’t cut it.  After an hour of operation, the CPU and motherboard temperatures were reading 50 degrees Celsius.
• This thing gets really, really heavy, so don’t plan on moving it once you’ve filled the tank
• Forget about upgrading parts, did I mention that its really messy?
• And finally, how the hell do you dispose of that much mineral oil?

Conclusions:

Although it is technically feasible to do this, I really don’t know where this project stands from a practicality standpoint.  Using oil is messy as hell, and in order to reach reasonable cooling temperatures, you’ll have to build a rig that will circulate the oil through a chilled radiator.  And on that note, you’ll probably need something industrial-strength for that since mineral oil is significantly more viscous than water.  If you genuinely want to turn this into a server, you’ll have to build another rig to do this.

So on that note, although this project is cool as hell, its just a pain in the ass to maintain.