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This innocuous-looking hard drive is a Seagate Cheetah ST34501N. It was one of the first 10,000rpm SCSI drives available and, as JimX so eloquently put it, it's "probably one of the hottest HDD's ever made". I believe it - the top of the drive becomes almost painfully hot within half an hour of sitting in still air - even on top of a desk, never mind buried in the bowels of a case. Seagate's Installation Guide for this model suggests very strongly that you need forced-air cooling for this drive. Unfortunately, I'm going to use it in a fairly cheap rack-mount case that doesn't have much in the way of drivebay airflow.
We'll first test this drive mounted in a generic 3.5 to 5.25 converter kit - you can see the two metal brackets in the photo above. Note also the thermal probe stuck to the top of the drive. This is not actually the hottest part of the drive - the other end which houses the spinning platters gets warmer but is much harder to monitor - as the fans of the MS-10 will be blowing directly at that end of the drive, I don't want the airflow over the sensor to give falsely low readings. The metal plate across the top of the drive should conduct heat pretty evenly after the drive temperature levels out anyway.
This is the funky shock-mounted drive cage that came with the rackmount case I'll be using the drive in. Not the greatest for airflow unfortunately. Notice the other two drives in close proximity - neither run as hot as the Cheetah, but the one below it is a 7200rpm SCSI-2 unit so fairly warm.
Here's the testing setup, with HDD cage installed into the case. The thermal probe was attached to a DigiDoc5 which was also monitoring ambient temperature (you can see the 2nd probe disappearing off to the right of the photo above).
Mounting the Cheetah in the MS-10 cooler was very easy - 8 screws are provided: 4 to mount the drive into the MS-10 and 4 to mount the MS-10 into the drive bay. It's a simple matter of sliding the drive into place and using screws to hold it in place with the top plate firmly against the heatsink. Note the molex passthrough connector. The black cable vanishing off the bottom of the picture is the thermal probe connector of course. I will note that the contact between the heatsink and HDD top was not perfect - there was a slight air gap towards the centre of the drive. This was no doubt made worse by the presence of the thermal probe, but it looks to me like the heatsink is slightly bowed. It's a minor niggle and there is plenty of contact once the drive is screwed into place. If you really cared I guess you could smear the entire top of your drive with Arctic Silver or similar. :)
Testing consisted of powering the machine up with the cover off (too tricky to get the cabling for the DigiDoc outside the case with the cover on) and leaving it running, doing nothing, for 30 minutes. The temperature shown on the DigiDoc for that channel was then recorded. This was done with the generic drivebay converter then the machine was allowed to cool before the procedure was run again with the Cheetah in the MS-10. Why didn't I stress the drive and run it under load during the tests? To be honest, I'm not game to run the Cheetah under load in the generic mounting kit - when you see the temperatures it reached you'll see why:
That's with the drive sitting at idle! Most of the heat comes from the platter motor, but if the drive had been grinding away doing a defrag or similar it could easily have been much hotter. Ambient temperature was 21C so we can see the MS-10 is doing a good job of getting the heat off the drive and into the air. A nice side-effect of this unit is that the drive in the bay below was cooled considerably too, as a fair portion of the air is deflected downwards onto it. As a demonstration of how effective the heatsink is: after testing the drive in the generic kit it was seriously hot to the touch. I mounted it in the MS-10 then fiddled around with the machine waiting for it to cool down. In only a few minutes the MS-10 heatsink had noticeably warmed to the touch, the big aluminium sink acting as a heat sump and sucking the heat off the drive even as they were sitting on my desk.
One niggle I have is with the dust filter. The fans on this unit are very quiet and as mentioned earlier they don't exactly pump out the air - I thought this was due to the particular model of fan, but I discovered that removing the filter from the front of the unit made a big difference to the amount of airflow. Closer inspection (the highly scientific put-it-to-your-lips-and-blow test) reveals the filter to be really restrictive. While the filter plate is easily removed from the unit, the actual filter element itself is not and this would make it tricky to clean. The drive felt considerably colder while running with the filter removed but sadly I didn't think to try this until long after testing and re-using the DigiDoc elsewhere. As this server will be installed in a clean and dust-free computer room, I will leave the filter off. However I was impressed with the unit's performance even with the filter intact - here's a picture of the machine running with filter installed - MS-10 in the top bay:
Yes, I know the drive cooler will be hidden behind the door when the case is all locked up - I'll deal with that later. :)
Conclusions:
As mentioned earlier, not everyone will need this kind of device.
There are usually ways to get airflow over your drives without
resorting to such a specialised solution. However, in many cases
this is not possible - in such a situation, I'd have no problems
recommending the Macase MS-10 hard drive cooler. The performance
matches its impressive looks - it's a simple and effective solution
if you have a free 5.25 bay. At an RRP of AUD$75 some may think
it pricey, but what price do you put on your high-speed HDD and
the data it contains? This unit is made by Macase in Taiwan - Australian resellers should
contact Fortune
Tec P/L who were kind enough to send us this review unit -
normal users can buy it from ComputerMarket.
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