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Product: Ultra 3.5" Aluminum Hard Drive Cooler with Heatpipes
Provided By: Ultra Products
Related Product:
Introduction:
What we have here today is a nice hard drive cooler from Ultra Products. Ultra is a company that provides just about everything with either a three year or lifetime warranty on every product (I thought that was pretty cool).
Package Front
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Package Back
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Specs & Features:
Specifications
- Heatpipe Material: Sintered Powder Heatpipe
- Heatsink Material: Aluminum
- Grounding: Wire Grounding
- Dimensions: 143 x 122 x 42mm
- Weight: 402g
Features
- Passive Thermal solution for Hard Drives
- High performance sintered powder heatpipe dissipates heat efficiently
- Rubber dampers reduce HDD noise and vibration
- Top heatsink fins provide an outstanding cooling surface area
- Fan-less operation
Cooler Installed - Top
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Cooler Installed - Bottom
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First Impressions:
In terms of price I thought that it was a little too expensive for a hard drive cooling solution. But I guess good cooling comes at a price.
Installing this HDD cooler was a bit tricky. The instructions for getting the cooler itself on the HDD was well illustrated in the form of a sheet with a short description underneath each picture of a series of seven steps.
Instructions
When completed, the cooling system and HDD takes up a slot in the 5.25" drive bays. I had lots of these bays so it wasn’t a problem. However, with some older, smaller computers which only have a couple of these bays there may not be enough room for both HDD and cd/dvd drives.
My particular case had those pretty little sliding lock thingies on the side to lock the disk drives into place so I couldn't find a place to "affix" the end of the grounding cable to the case. You'd be hard pressed to find a case without the sliders since most new cases come with them installed. I ended up screwing the grounding cable to the very front of the case in one of the screw holes there; luckily the cable was long enough. 
Grounding Cable
For
the testing process of this hard drive cooler, I used SpeedFan to clock the
temperatures in Celsius degrees. SpeedFan logs the temperatures in graph form
for up to 4 hours at one time. The graph below shows the three different
classes of temperatures that I thought were relevant.
Temperature Performance
First on the graph we have the idle temperatures of both the unaugmented hard drive and then with the Ultra cooler on it. To get the idle temps I booted my computer up, started speedfan, and left my computer for about an hour and took the resulting temperature. As you can see by the graph, the temperature drops by a full 6 degrees Celsius between drives.
The average temperature is the next set of bars on the graph. This is the average working temperature; I copied a 5.7GB file to another folder on the same drive and then archived it using the highest setting. A 5C difference characterized this test.
The last sets of bars on the graph are exactly what they say – the highest temperature I ever saw the hard drive go during my test periods. The 4 degree drop in temperature provided the difference between each value.
Conclusion:
All-in-all this cooler did perform well, if you have some money to spend and you are looking for a quick fix for a hard drive temperature problem I would recommend that you consider this product as an option.
Pros:
- Good cooling
- Easy install
Cons:
- High price
- Uses a 5.25” drive bay
I'd like to thank Ultra Products for sending over their HDD Cooler for us to look at. If you're running a system that you want to keep quiet and cool, this is worth looking at if you don't want to add another fan in your box.
Please post any comments or questions about this product in our forum at the "Comments" link below.
 (1) Comments
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