 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 mid-tower 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 starts 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 419C340G. It's xylene free, toluene free, low VOC 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 old-fashioned 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 bill 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-filled 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 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 because I think the spray booth is over in 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 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 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 gonna reinstall this on the hard drive and test it outside before we try to put it in the water. 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 gonna give it the ol' have you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in repeatedly. Try and sort of save the money 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 coming up. I don't even think it's spinning up. Hmm. 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 that I didn't sand. The ones for power for the motor. So of course it's not spinning up. No. Let's go ahead and give that the old, you know, hard drive sanding technique. Yes! Okay, there it is. There's our 10 terabyte drive. Okay. So, it's time. Time for what? Time to figure out what data I can copy for a test. I am basically going to take the drive and put it in. We're gonna see what happens. What the hell is this? Okay, so it's some kind of LAN issue. I will deal with that later. In the meantime, I've got a USB type C ethernet adapter here, and I've 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 gonna take this drive, which is currently writing 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. I'm about three quarters 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 and mirrors, that's not mineral oil. Here's a new jug. Look, tap water, tap water AF. 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. Is it still transferring? No! Okay, so let's get the moisture. I think the power shorted. I think that's what happened here. Uh-oh, I don't know what effect alcohol has on the conformal coating. Did not think that through. Okay, so it's been popping kind of in and out of being detected. 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 gonna make a mess here, but as you guys know, I'm allergic to funnels. So chances seem pretty good. Here we go. Shoop. Wonderful now. Okay. So here we go. Can it handle mineral oil? I wanna see a longer sustained transfer here, kids. That's what I wanna 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 Massdrop, they're the community where users discuss products that they're interested in buying. And then Massdrop talks to the manufacturer and negotiates a bulk order at a discounted price. And they're now featuring a drop for the Hi-Fi Man RE00IEMs. They have nine millimeter dynamic drivers, and they ship with two pairs of silicone ear tips. And they're only about $35 US dollars, 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. Maybe even consider checking out our merch store where you can buy cool shirts like this one, or our link to Amazon where you can buy stuff like what we featured in the video. Like, I don't know, maybe this 10 terabyte 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. Ah, excuse me. Come and throw me. Our video on the desk PC that you see right here, our part three, the conclusion is up, and ready for your viewing enjoyment.