Intro:

Hard disks, nowadays the prices of these little components have come down a lot. Instead of archiving data onto CD/DVD people are just adding more HD’s to their system. 200gb of extra storage can provide you with enough room for the next years to come.

But then the inevitable happens. A hard disk crash. The IBM 60/70 GXP Deskstar (better know as Deathstar) stopped working when temperature rose to high. To avoid these problems in the future it might be wise to add some extra cooling to your system.

Today I’m testing the PC-HDB(P) passive hard disk cooling from Primecooler. They also send me their optional Primecooler PC-HDB2(BS) active 5.25” bay cooling solution.

I’ll be monitoring the temperature from my hard disk by using the built-in S.M.A.R.T. monitoring tool. Which can be read from with-in Windows using a nifty utility called SpeedFan.

Specifications of the products:




Official PrimeCooler site.

Packaging:



The boxes were kind of soft, and caused the internals to move about quite a lot. A studier cardboard box would prevent this from happening.

PC-HDB(P)

This is basically the most important part from the cooling, one big heatsink.

Installation

Installing the passive cooling is really piece of cake. Place your hard disk on the black heatsink and screw it tight. And finally increase the pressure of the heatsink on the HD by the use of 4 springs. Thanks to this the heatsink will be settled in a perfect position on top of the hard disk.

Than place the entire unit in an empty 5.25” bay and you’re done! But watch out, if you want to use the optional fan solution you have to place this heatsink as far as possible into the case otherwise the fans won’t fit.








PC-HDB2(BS)

This is the active part about the cooling. The two 40mm fans create a significant enough airflow to cool down the heatsink and thus the hard disk. A removable front grill with dust filter makes sure no dirt will enter your case and it’s easy to clean out.

The fans look a little bit like Delta’s on the outside … which might be a forewarning when it comes to noise generation.

The package says:



Super silent ? Not at all ! 40 mm high rpm fans can’t be


Installation

Also very easy. Screw the bracket in front of the heatsink; watch out for the power cable, not to squeeze it between the case and the unit itself, and hook up the pass-through molex to your PSU.






Side look, watch out for these cables while installing...



Dual fans:




Removable grill:


And removed...


Fan in close up:

Testing


The cooling installed :

Test setup
Mobo & CPU	Shuttle AN50R & A64 3000+
Hard Disk	Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 120 Gig 8 Mb Cache
Case	Coolermaster centurion case, no case cooling

I’ll be monitoring the temperatures of the hard disk in four different scenarios:

No cooling, placed in a hidden 3.5” rack

One 80 mm fan @ 5 Volt behind that 3.5” rack

PC-HDB(P), thus only the heatsink

PC-HDB(P) + PC-HDB2(BS)

Now, how do you stress a HDD ? I started to copy a large amount of files on the hard disk. For over 1,5 hour per test I copied and deleted files…The highest temperature was monitored when it remained the same for at least 20 minutes..



Both the completely passive solutions (no cooling & PC-HDB(P)) result in the same temperatures, but with the heatsink installed, it took the HDD more than half an hour longer to reach the same temperature!

The 80 mm fan had about 1000 rpm @5v and was very silent. Compared to “no cooling” solution it provided a noticeable temperature decrease.

The dual 40 mm fans were quite loud, certainly when used in to my almost completely silent setup. Temperature wise it certainly proved effective as a drop of ~25% could be seen compared to the completely passive solution.

Would the hard disk live also 25% longer in this situation? Don’t know it for sure, but there is a good reason why server cases have active cooling in front of their HD racks, hard disk are more prominent to failure when temperature rises above acceptable levels.

Time for the conclusion... >>

Conclusion

Over here at Madshrimps there are some people that have a case stuffed full with HDD’s and they still crave for more drive space …

By using this unit you can build in a 3.5 “ HDD in a 5.25” drive bay and keep them running cool!

Overall this cooling gets a positive rating, I’m actually still using it, but it’s a real pity that the included fans are that loud.


PRO
Super cooling
Possible to use 3.5 “ HDD in a 5.25” drive bay

CON
Optional fans are loud

We would like to thank Eva for providing us with the unit for review. Check the PrimeCooler website for more innovative products.



Questions/Comments: Forum thread