Voyager HD Cooler Author: faceless105 -- Posted: 2007-08-21
Lowering the temperatures of any component in your computer is a good idea. Lower temperatures will result in better performance and a longer life. One piece of hardware that really deserves this attention is the hard drive. Today we will be taking a closer look at the Voyager, one of Vizos hard drive coolers.
Normally when you hear about cooling you first hear about the CPU and that is with good reason but surprisingly I think the second most common element is the graphics card. This is surprising to me because a graphics card can be replaced without having any large effects on your system. Ultimately this all ties in with the Disaster Recovery and Prevention articles I've been writing. Once your hard drive over heats, there is little chance of being able to recover it, and at that point, your computer becomes one big paper weight.
The Voyager HD Cooler comes equipped with two 50mm fans that both spin at speeds of 4000 RPM. While these aren't the most powerful fans on the market they will move more then enough air to help cool your hard drive. In addition to this they are nearly silent, which anyone who puts an emphasis on cooling can tell you really makes a difference.
Installation is simple. All that you need to do is screw your cooler into the bottom of your HD with the provided screws. It comes with a male/female four pin molex to power it. This works perfectly for PATA hard drives. If you have a SATA drive you'll just need to plug the power into a four pin molex.
I've noticed that my SATA drive runs at much higher temperatures then my PATA drive. This could be a coincidence, the SATA is much newer and with far larger capacities. Before adding the cooler it had an average temperature of 37.5 Celsius and after adding the cooler it lowered it to 34.5 Celsius. It may not sound like a lot but its closer to 6 Fahrenheit and the difference of soaring near 100 Fahrenheit. This even made a very noticeable difference upon touching the drive.
In addition I wanted to be really thorough and run some benchmarking to see if this would make much of a difference. There was in fact a speed increase but it was only approximately 1mb/sec which made me think that I might want to accredit that to the computer running less applications or some other change in the testing state.
I feel that these results really are proof that a little cooling can go a long ways. I'd really like to thank Vizo for giving me the chance to review the Voyager. I'm continually impressed with the products that Vizo produces. If any of you are looking for hard drive cooling I'd recommend checking out the Voyager or any of their other cooling solutions.
As always if anyone has any questions or comments I'm ready for them :)
