With hard drives getting faster and faster, the heat is increasing. If you have ever run your computer and then touched your hard drive it can be very hot. Whenever computer components are exposed to heat they break down faster. This hard drive cooler is one solution; it’s called the Cool Drive 4002 and is made by Cooler Master. The Cool Drive 4002 is aluminum and comes with a installation guide, and 12 screws for installation, and a 40mm fan.
The box is very sleek looking and attractive.
The back of the box is equally as cool looking giving you a quick overview of what it can do.
Here’s a shot of the cooler right out of the box, we will look further next.
The Cool Drive 4002 is broken into 2 parts; the bottom part which you mount your hard drive onto.
And top half of the Cool Drive 4002 holds the fan, 4-pin Molex adapter, and has a thermal pad attached to dissipate heat.
The specs of the fan is the following.
Fan size: 40 x 40 x 20 (mm)
Rated Voltage: 12 VDC
Rated Speed: 4500 RPM
Air Flow: 9.21 CFM
Noise Level: 29 dB(A)
The faceplate of the drive can be removed by hand and includes a removable filter, which is a very nice addition because you don’t want to get dirt inside of your computer.The Cool Drive 4002 comes with instructions for installation and 12 screws, 8 are black and 4 are crome.
First you will need the bottom part of the Cool Drive 4002, you will mount your hard drive to this. The Cool Drive 4002 supports both IDE and SCSI hard drives. I will be using a 30GB 7200RPM Western Digital IDE hard drive. You will see that the bottom of the hard drive and the mounting plate have 4 holes.
Align the 4 holes on the mounting plate with the 4 holes on your hard drive and use the 4 come screws to attach the mounting plate to your hard drive. Make sure that the end of your hard drive with the connections is on the side opposite of the cutout.
Your hard drive should now be securely in place and ready to install to the top half.
Take the mounting plate with your hard drive attached to it and place it into the top half of the Cool Drive 4002. It should fit in place with no struggle. Use 4 of the black screws and screw them into the 4 holes to attach the mount plate to the top.
You should now be done mounting your hard drive into your Cool Drive 4002; the back of the unit should be exposing the connectors.
Take the Cool Drive 4002 with your hard drive installed and choose the 5.25 bay that you want to install it into. Slide it all the way in until it is where you want it. Use the 4 remaining black screws to secure the Cool Drive 4002 into the drive bay. Connect your IDE/SCSI cable back to your hard drive, along with the Molex for the power. You will also need to plug the Molex connector for the fan in the Cool Drive 4002 to one from your power supply.
That’s about it as far as installation goes, here’s the Cool Drive 4002 installed, it looks really cool. Now lets see how it performs…
I attached a thermal probe to the bottom side of the hard drive, onto the PCB because I have noticed that this is the hottest surface on the drive usually.
In both tests I let the drive idle for about 30 minutes and then took the readings from the Compunurse. Here are the results without the Cool Drive 4002 and with it. The ambient temperature for both tests was 22.4 degrees Celsius.
As you can see from the above graph there was a 6.3 degree drop in temperature while using the Cool Drive 4002 this is a big difference when you consider all the valuable information you have on your hard drive.
Conclusion
Temperature is always a factor you need to consider with any computer component. The Cool Drive 4002 will bring the temperature of your hard drive down to a level, which is much safer. If you have important things on your hard drive and want decrease the chances of your hard drive failing and possibly loosing all the information on it I would highly suggest this hard drive cooler to you. Not only does it look cool and perform well, but it will also dampen the sound of your hard drive accessing. I would like to thank Tony from Pham Computer for giving me this product to review, head on over and pick one up.