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Vizo Orbiter Hard Drive Cooler |
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Written by Mikhail Ivanenkov
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Friday, 03 August 2007 |
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Page 2 of 2
And here it is installed. It doesn't quite reach the other set of holes, but two are more than enough to secure it. Although the installation is simple, the location of the cooler isn't ideal - the fan is too close to the PCB. This causes unnecessary air pressure; consequently the air has very little room to escape (between the bottom of the cooler and the PCB). This of course pushes a lot of the air back up through the fan, interfering with flow characteristics in the process. We'll see how the test results come out.
A pleasant surprise came when I powered the cooler on - blue LEDs. Testing was done using a recently reviewed Western Digital 750GB HDD which tends to get pretty hot. First I measured idle and load temperatures on the drive without a cooler. Idle was recorded after the drive sat there doing nothing for an hour. Load was recorded after one hour of Sandra's Burn In test looping the Physical Disks benchmark. I then plugged in the cooler and repeated the process. All of this took place in a basement with a relatively stable climate. Temperatures were taking using a Fluke 561 HVACPro IR thermometer at a distance of about 1". The side of the hard drive was measured. Ambient temperature was recorded at 23.5C. The drive resided in an open air environment (no additional fans). The results are as follows.
As you can tell there's a pretty significant temperature drop - 13C on idle and 15.5C on load. You would think this is a monster of a cooler right? Not exactly. These are differences between having a cooler and having no cooler at all, so naturally there's going to be a significant gap. The effectiveness of the cooler vs. the competition will be better seen in upcoming reviews where we pit the Orbiter against several other models. Still, this goes to show that having some sort of hard drive cooling, whether it be in the form of a dedicated unit or simply a case fan is a good idea - particularly if you own a drive that gets toasty. The only downside to the Orbiter (and any other belly mounted HDD cooler for that matter) is that you'll need some extra space between it and the next drive down, possibly cutting down on usable bays. This is when you have to ask yourself if a case fan would be better suited (if available that is).
Pros
- Nice, simple design
- Relatively quiet
- Good performance
- Blue LEDs
Cons
- Fan sits too close to the drive (effectively reducing airflow)
- Mounting method requires extra room in the 3.5" cage
Vizo's Orbiter is a decent cooler. It has a solid design, it does the job, it's relatively quiet, and it's got blue lights. There's nothing particularly revolutionary about it, but it will cool your hard drive. Feel free to comment on this review here. Thanks for reading and enjoy the site!
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Last Updated ( Monday, 06 August 2007 )
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