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The Heat Reducing Benefits of SSD Technology for Industrial PCsWhen designing a PC for use in industrial environments one of the challenges is ensuring it can operate reliably despite hot conditions. In performing complicated processes at high speed they generate a lot of heat internally, and they also have to cope with the heat from surrounding machinery. Should a PC overheat then it risks losing vital data or breaking down completely. If a PC malfunctions then production can grind to a halt for several hours whilst it’s replaced, incurring significant operational losses for the manufacturer. However, industrial PCs can now be built to operate reliably for literally 1000s of hours in temperatures of over 70º C. This has become possible due to SSD (solid state drive) technology, which doesn’t contain moving parts, consumes less power and generates less heat than conventional hard disks.1 Desktop PC Cooling is inadequateConventional desktop PCs use a combination of heat sinks and fans to dissipate heat away from the CPU.2 Whilst adequate for room temperatures, if a PC is used in a hot industrial environment then this decades old cooling method isn’t going to be powerful enough to prevent it from overheating. A superior option is to use heat pipes and water cooling, which is able to dissipate up to 180 W of CPU heat. Heat is conducted from the CPU into surrounding pipes containing liquid (usually distilled water) which evaporates. The absorbed heat is then dissipated through surrounding aluminium cooling fins.3 Heat pipes offer considerable improvements over heat sinks in performance and reliability. But the best solution for minimising the risk of a PC overheating is to eliminate its moving parts altogether. Fanless, diskless technologyConventional hard disks are constantly whirring away at high speed reading and writing data. When the PC is being used for complex processes then the hard disk generates a significant amount of heat. For lower end applications, flash drives can be used instead. They have no moving parts, consume less power and generate less heat than a hard disk. They also offer greater reliability against the risk of vibrations, shock or magnetic fields, which can all cause a hard disk to malfunction.4 Until recently the use of flash technology was hampered by its relatively small memory size. However, in recent years SSD technology (which is based on flash) has become available commercially that can provide up to 512 Gigabytes of memory.5 The benefits of SSDSSDs were initially used by the military and aerospace industries for mission critical applications because of their exceptional reliability and performance in harsh conditions. Faster, more reliable and more energy efficient than hard disks, industrial grade SSDs can operate efficiently at temperatures over 70ºC.6 They can be bundled with applications preinstalled and custom designed so the entire housing acts as a heat sink dissipating heat. Fanless, diskless SSD technology enables industrial PCs to operate reliably in excessively hot conditions for literally 1000s of hours, and it reduces the risk of manufacturing downtime because of a malfunctioning PC.
1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_driveg
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Special Computing Solutions to Industry
