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If you’ve been watching Cooler Master’s product
line for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with the CoolDrive
series. Having gone through quite a few revisions through the years, I was
rather interested to see what Cooler Master had in store after the CoolDrive
5. Surprisingly, it is not over the top with features! Instead they’ve handed
us a pretty nice budget hard drive cooler – dubbed the CoolDrive Lite - which
features all aluminum construction and a blower-style fan. On with the
review!
Packaging & Contents
The retail box reflects Cooler Master’s current
style, complete with the bright purple color, lots of pics, and a few
specifications. The contents were understandably simple, only including the
CoolDrive Lite itself, a small instruction booklet, and a bag of hardware.
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**click to enlarge** |
The CoolDrive Lite has the same all aluminum
construction that we’ve seen in the other HDD coolers from this series. The
front is plastic, with a mesh grille surrounding the CoolDrive logo on the
front of the device.
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**click to enlarge** |
**click to enlarge** |
**click to enlarge** |
Looking at the back and removing the HDD tray,
we can see a few small changes from its predecessors. Six large rubber
grommets provide noise dampening and the whole underside now more closely
resembles a heatsink than a tray. The hardware bag has the six long screws
you’ll need to secure the HDD to the caddy. Also visible is the only cable…a
standard Molex pass through that will power the blower. One of the little
things that bugs me about most HDD coolers is the propensity to use the 40mm
fan, which tends to whine a little bit even at lower RPMs. This was certainly
the case with most of the CoolDrive series devices that have come before. This
time however, Cooler Master has used a small blower to provide active cooling.
A quick check with a power supply revealed that it is much quieter than the
usual 40mm fan, and without the whine! That’s good news for a RAID arrangement
using these drives…you don’t want it sounding like a mosquito chorus! The
trade off appears to be a small half inch increase in depth, although this
should not affect most users.
Specifications
We could not find specs on the Coolermaster
website, however, the following specs were taken from the product box itself.
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Dimensions: 150 x 43 x 203 mm
- Fan
Dimensions:440mm blower fan, 3000 RPM +/- 10%, 23dba
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Power Input: 12V/ 1.5A +/- 5%
- Material: Aluminum
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