Key Features and Specifications from the Manufacturer:

* All aluminum case with heat sink bottom and high performance thermal pad for maximum cooling efficiency.
* Integrated 44mm blower, bottom and front panel venting for total HDD cooling.
* Reduce hard drive surface temperature and noise.
* Fits any 5.25” drive bay and any brand name hard drive.
* Supports both IDE; SCSI & SATA standard.
* Designed for DIY applications, can also be used for RAID towers, severs, industrial PCs.

The CoolDrive Lite fits any 5.25” drive bay and supports IDE; SCSI & SATA standards. The enclosure itself is made up of 2 main pieces. The top part of the Cooldrive Lite is made up of the faceplate which contains the 44mm fan and the top cover. The top section also has a thermal pad to help with cooling and noise reduction.

The bottom half is an aluminum heatsink where you physically mount your hard drive. The thermal pad (above left) covers the exposed circuit board on your hard drive and then you secure the hard drive in place using 6 screws. The screw holes have soft rubber surrounding them to help reduce vibrations that you’re hard drive produces.

Here you can see the rear of the CoolDrive Lite. You will notice all the aluminum fins that makeup the base of the enclosure. These fins are what will draw heat away from your hard drive and with the assistance of the front fan; efficiently dissipate the heat, increasing hard drive stability and life span.

Performance testing:

For today’s testing we are going to use a 7200 RPM Western Digital 80G JB hard drive with 8MB cache. To get started we will take both idle and load temperatures without the Cooldrive Lite installed, then we will test again with the hard drive installed in the enclosure but without any fan running and finally with the fan running. In order to achieve our load temperatures we will be capturing video from an external source and copying 30 GB of data from one drive to another. Ambient room temperature is 19c at the time of our testing.

dont have flash installed? then click here for a jpeg

Conclusion:

The CoolDrive Lite was a very pleasant surprise, it is appealing to look at, extremely easy to assemble and more importantly it really works! The CoolDrive Lite’s cooling abilities speak for itself as it was able to reduce idle temperatures by 4c and load temperatures by 9c from around 44c to 35c. It’s not the 41% claimed on their website but it is around 20% cooler so using the CoolDrive Lite will be benefical in helping ensure the stability and protection of your data. Another added benefit is that it will reduce hard drive noise.

There is nothing bad to say about the CoolDrive Lite and after looking at various online vendors you should be able to easily find one of these in the $45 CAD or around $40 USD price range. A truly great product !