Review Item...........................: Evercool CoolWheel
Supplied By............................: Evercool

As SATA hard drives get faster we find the RPM has stayed the same, but the added cache and readily available cheap drives with large capacities means we are raiding more often. This does improve system performance. But leaves me with two questions.

Why can you still only install RAID/SCSI drivers at install from a floppy?

How can you effectively cool a SATA HDD in a raid set up?

Well the answer to the first question is most likely going to be a mystery for some time, but the answer to the second one may be readily available right here. Evercools box of goodies that arrived a few days ago housed a new style of drive cooler. It does not draw cold air in from the base like most coolers, it in fact draws air from the drive side, in, and then out through the front and back of the unit. Simple idea, all working perfectly normally, only in a reverse sort of action.

Modern drives have minimal PCB''''''''s to run them. A recent Seagate drive I bought for a system build  had the smallest board I have ever seen. A mere 2"x3" board stuck at the back of the drive. I remember when the entire under side of a hard drive was a printed circuit board packed with everything need to control it. Now the biggest part is the sockets to connect them. Its one giant leap forward in electronics but the spindle speed does still mean we have heat. A pair of these drives in raid configurations are really cheap, with 160gb costing £35 each!

This does mean we have the heat issue rearing its ugly head again, and when data is as critical as it is in RAID, we need to keep it cool. There are hundreds of coolers on the market. Some house a disk itself, some are heatplates that stick to the drive top, some screw on underneath, some sit in front of the drive, and everyone at some point or other has tried to develop something new that works better. Everyone has had a new take on a similar solution. Then we met this one from Evercooler. It took the basics of the cooler and spun it around. Drawing the hot air from the drive side, into the impeller, and out of the front and back of the cooler simultaneously. No blowing cold air onto the cooler, this simply sucks the life right out of the heat and ejects it. In two directions!

Well its a great idea, and such a simple one, but what we need to do is look at it closely.

The retail packaging is the first thing you notice, it grabs your attention and holds it like a moth to a bright light. Its bright and vibrant, and at a £10 price tag it will certainly stay in your hand while your buying. When you get the packaging off your presented with a cooler and a pack of screws to fit it to your hard drive. Now it will fit IDE or SATA drives and is rather slim so should fit between drives nicely. Now this is a good point to note the logistics of the cooler. If you have a fan system the draws from the base onto the drive you cant sandwich drives together. With this cooler, the air is drawn from the drive side so you can pack the coolers and drives together and it wont affect the performance of the cooler, as long as the ends are not covered. Simple, but effective. I know this wont work this way in all cases but most will be fine stacking up HDD''''''''s with coolers.

With the system turned on you can tell the fans are going on the drive cooler. This for some people may be a little to much to bear. I was a little surprised at the level of noise but carried on regardless. The drive was run non stop for an hour to get the heat up and Sisoft Sandra is a perfect tool for this. The temperature was taken before cooling and after cooling. The temperatures were taken on the top plate of the drive and the underside. The latter was not accessible with a laser thermometer with the cooler fitted so a thermal probe was used instead. Its the only way to get a good reading in this test. The basic temperature of the drive was 44 degrees on the base and 38 on the top, taken by laser thermometer. With the cooling on the drive, and a further run in test to get it all running the temperature dropped on the underside by 8-9 degrees and on the top was 31 degrees!

The result you get for a mere £10 is rather promising, the life of the drive and the running of it in general is improved. But the only thing that did put me a little off of it was the noise it makes. You dont have a fan controller with the unit but you could add one without to much effort. Failing that simply swap the pins on the molex plug to put it on the lower voltage rail. On the whole its effective, very stylish and vibrant looking and it does work well. So all in all it has to be said, its a fantastic price for a novel solution to an age old problem and one that certainly get a big thumbs up from us.