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Installation & Testing
The device itself is pretty standard…an aluminum
chassis that attaches to a lower bracket that actually mounts the drive. There
are four connectors on the back – a Molex connector, two HDD header
connectors, and a temp probe connector. There extensions I mentioned earlier
are for plugging the CoolDrive 5 to the motherboard header, and then from the
drive out to the HDD indicator on the chassis. The wire with the probe is
actually pretty long…monitoring something like the CPU is totally feasible.
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One rather welcome addition is the inclusion of
a simple set of rubber grommets to isolate the vibrations of the hard drive
from the chassis itself. The tray even has extra large openings to help slide
them into place.
The installation went very smoothly, and the
CoolDrive 5 soon found a home in a new Silverstone Temjin 6 that will be the
subject of a seriously in-depth look in the near future. I ended up using a
Western Digital Caviar SATA 200 gig drive that housed my root directory as the
test drive in the temperature tests. Probes were secured to the spindle of all
three drives, to get a feel for how well the CoolDrive 5 performs.
After a prolonged testing session with Doom 3, the CoolDrive 5 was
consistently reporting temperatures about 4-5 degrees less than the other two
drives, which is about what we’d expect to see from a device like this.
Turning the fan up or down did make a small difference of about 2 degrees.
Finally, I shot a series of pictures comparing the colors of the CoolDrive 5
to the Musketeer II, and a single photo on the bottom right of the blue in
comparison to the Musketeer 1.
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