Antec HDD Cooler Review - Testing the hard drive cooler
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When I first set up the HD cooler I really hadn’t noticed anything. The fans are not very loud at all but offer a little hum that silence freaks will definitely notice, although I think if you're putting a heavy workload on your hard drive, you clearly can hear that over the cooler's fans. The front display looks great with my black and gray themed case. And the displayed temperature and sensor indicator are clearly visible at night. This is all great, it certainly looks good but how well does it perform? Lets see what kind of results I get when I put my hard drive and cooler to the test.
The actual testing of the cooler is really a test on the drive, with the goal to see what kind of heat load I can create on the drive with and without the HD cooler, and record the temperatures. I placed both probes onto the hard drive, one above the actuator arm of the drive, where the read write heads are. At the bottom of the hard drive in the middle where the platter motor is located, I decided to use my faster Hitachi hard drive in the tests; it runs much faster and runs much warmer.
I used a few programs to put a heavy work load on the hard drive to make sure it’s getting a workout. I decided to defragment my hard drive while running Sandra’s disk space benchmark, and HD Tach just for fun. All the while I’ve attempted to load random applications on my computer, although it’s taking very long because of the excessive work load, and is pretty noisy listening to the read write head going crazy.
Test Bed- Pentium D 805 @ 3.5ghz (both cores)
- ASUS P5WD2 Premium
- 2 x 512MB D9 Memory Sticks (3224)
- Sapphire X800 GTO2, (X850XTPE clock speeds)
- Phillips Lightscribe DVD+RW drive
- Hitachi Deskstar 80GB SATA 3.0gb/s drive
Next: Results >>
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