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15-Aug-01 - Review by: James "Agg" Rolfe page 1 2 A disturbing trend among computer equipment in recent years is the propensity to heat itself to destruction. The shining example of this is AMD's Athlon which, with poor heatsink contact, becomes so hot that in less than 10 seconds it will be squirting foul-smelling oily goo out of the sides of the now-dead core. Heading down a similar path are hard disk drives that, while not being quite so spectacular, can easily heat themselves beyond their own tolerances which can dramatically shorten their life and cause data corruption problems as bearings overheat, electronics become confused and the sheer mechanical stress from thermal expansion takes its toll. The solution to this, of course, is airflow. In the high-tech server world where 10,000 or 15,000rpm drives are commonplace, specialised chassis designs with high airflow over the HDD area are the norm. However now that 7200rpm drives are the performance standard for IDE, more and more hot-running HDD's are being crammed into normal desktop or tower cases, sometimes with little or no forethought about cooling. Hence the emergence of products like this one, that allow you to provide direct cooling of a HDD in a generic case. Of course, many cases provide good cooling to drive bays and with a little airflow tweaking you can reduce much of the risk.. but some are woeful when it comes to cooling - and some HDD's are heat monsters. This particular unit is made by Macase, they of the popular K10 Sunrise midtower we reviewed a while ago here. I include this picture of the box simply because of the bizarre name on it. Before the review unit arrived I'd only ever heard of it as the MS-10 .. but the box says in big letters "HERMANNATOR". Do they mean Therminator? Who can say.  click to enlarge The unit itself is much more impressive-looking:  click to enlarge It centres around a hefty chunk of (presumably extruded) aluminium. In many ways it's similar to the so-called Ultimate HDD Cooler I reviewed a few months ago, but the top of this unit is shaped into more traditional heatsink fins for greater surface area. You mount a drive under the unit so the top of the head-disk assembly (HDA) area presses against the heatsink.  click to enlarge At the front, behind a removable dust filter there are two 40mm Sunon ball-bearing fans. These are very thick, much more so than the 486-cooler type 40mm fans more commonly seen. Being Sunon they give you some reassurance of reliability and as there's two, should one fail your drive will still be cooled. However, there is no facility provided to monitor the RPM's of the fans so you won't know if a fan fails unless you are actively monitoring the HDD temperature or removing the dust filter while the unit is powered. The air is directed both along the top edge of the heatsink (among the fins) and straight into the back of the drive. This means that some air flows under the drive as well, helping to cool the electronics. Realistically though, most of the heat from a HDD is generated within the HDA area so that's where the focus should be - and is, with this design.  click to enlarge These fans don't produce massive amounts of airflow, it must be said. However, the upside to this is that it's almost silent when running. Power to the fans is supplied by a cable that runs through a channel in the heatsink (the thick "fin" visible along the top of the unit). This cable ends in a strange 2-pin connector, not the 3-pin connector we normally associate with fans. Macase provide a Molex passthrough connector which plugs into this cable, so it's no big deal. On the next page, we see how it fares at keeping a 10,000rpm SCSI drive from bursting into flames.. Other Recent Articles:
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