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Well, with the HD-600 flipped into the junk box I bring your attention to the second unit in this review - the Ultimate Hard Drive Cooler (AUD$60.00 from www.pccoolers.com). If you've been following my reviews regularly (as I'm sure you have) you might have noticed my references to a mythical clear perspex case to show off some of the more interesting hardware goodies that are showing up. You'd have the Millennium Edition motherboard, of course, and the SuperDual Cooler.. and now, for sheer "what the hell is that?" value, you'd have the Ultimate Hard Drive Cooler in there, too.

This one makes no pretense about trying to fit into a 3.5" bay. It sports a huge blue-adonized aluminium heatsink, twin 40mm fans, a ventilated front 5.25" bezel, 5.25" mounting rails and it's own pretentious name emblazoned across the top in nice flowing lettering.

(shown mounted on a Quantum Fireball +KA)

Quite a clever spring-loaded mounting system allows you to clamp the heatsink down onto the drive once you've screwed it into the included 5.25" rails. The heatsink itself consists of 11 square-section tubes running from front to back of the drive. One of these is blocked by the cable which powers the fans (via a pass-through molex connector) and 4 of them have a smaller fin running along their length. Air from the top of the two 40mm fans blows through these holes, cooling the heatsink and hence the entire top surface of the drive. Most drives have raised patterns on the top plate, so you won't get full contact with the entire surface but on all the drives I checked the HDA enclosure cover would press firmly against the heatsink - this is a Good Thing. The electronics on the bottom of the drive are cooled by airflow from the bottom third of the fans. This is a fairly significant flow of air (and keep in mind this is fresh air from outside the case) - however, given that the faceplate was obviously designed for 3 fans (see pic below), it's strange they only supply two. For AUD$60.00, and with a name like this, you'd think they'd pull out all the stops.

Anyway, what about performance? As this unit requires mounting in a 5.25" bay, I first tested the drive in a standard 5.25" mounting kit. The electronics on the bottom of the drive registered 40C after 30 minutes of defragging. I didn't test the top surface as the only exposed bit with the cooler mounted has the exhaust from the cooler blowing directly over it so temperature measurements will be skewed. If this unit is doing it's job the entire drive should be noticeably cooler. Of course, there is some airflow across the electronics too, so the readings there may be a little lower than the actual temp of the electronics themselves. After 30 mins of defragging in the Ultimate Hard Drive Cooler, my Quantum Fireball +KA, a 7200rpm drive, was registering 27.4C - a significant drop in temperature.

Conclusions:
I stand by my position that the entire concept of a hard drive cooler is of debatable usefulness to overclockers, as we usually have well-cooled cases and our hard drives don't really get THAT warm. However, I accept that some people will insist on using little tiny cases jammed with high-performance goodies and that (for a variety of reasons, even in larger cases) it is not always easy to ensure good airflow past the drive bays. In those kind of situations, if you have enough room for mounting it and can afford it, the Ultimate Hard Drive Cooler certainly delivers. There is probably some situation where the HD-600 is useful, but I couldn't replicate it during testing. Be aware that either of these units might disturb the path of air through your case - if you've paid careful attention to getting good flow across the motherboard area this may be affected so check your CPU temps.