|
Vantec Vortex Hard Drive Cooling System
Date: Sunday, December 7, 2003
Author: Joe Di Figlia
Provided By: Sidewindercomputers.com
Page: 3 of 4
|
This unit sports a crossflow blower which sways from conventional hard drive cooling designs. This allows one fan to cool the entire surface of the hard drive. Most other designs use small radial fans which measure only 40mm and push very little air. They also provide dead spots in air flow. Some people might lead you to believe that this is a major drawback, the dead spot that is. In some ways it is, in others it doesn't really matter. Let me explain. If you look at your hard drive… go ahead, it's alright; you will notice that it looks like one big heatsink (with the proper perspective). Well, guess what, IT IS!!! Its passive cooling, and all we are doing here is creating an ACTIVE cooling environment to secure that our hard drive doesn't stop working due to overheating. Now the purpose of a heatsink is to spread heat from one spot to cover a large amount of surface area. This surface area can then be cooled more efficiently. More surface area equates to better cooling. This crossflow blower simply covers more area at a time than coolers using 1 40mm fan.
 
The fan demonstrates some rather impressing statistics though, much of which are equal to larger 80mm fans. First off, it actually pushes quite a bit of air. Rated at 30CFM it can cool a CPU without any real problems. The only drawback to this is that when it's pushing the maximum amount of air it also creates its maximum amount of noise, a not so incredibly annoying 38dB. Most fans that run at that noise make a high pitched whine, but with this crossflow blower you don't get that. The fan also has a 3 pin Molex for power. I like this idea because it doesn't limit the ability to replace the fan without soldering. This also allows you to use a 3 pin Molex splitter and hook up some hyper LED's to shine behind the front grill of the unit. I see some modding opportunities arising here.
 
Temperature is monitored from an included thermal sensor. This sensor is intended, according to the provided instructions, to be attached to the bottom of the hard drive. The readings then make their way to the LCD via a two pin Molex. The ideas are flowing through my head any time I see something that isn't soldered in. It can be very simple to get another thermal sensor with a longer cord and take readings from your CPU instead of your HDD. I tested the accuracy of the thermal sensor against 2 others that I and found that it's right on the money.
Now we are getting to the meat between the bread. Let's see if this unit can stack up against standard configurations in most cases. The drive's competition is simply a couple of Panaflo fans in the front of my Lian Li PC-75. Testing is simple; I take measurements at random intervals throughout the course of my normal day.
|
|
|
