Kingwin Hard Drive Cooler KHD-201

SUMMARY: A hard drive cooler, nicely constructed, that drops drive temps.

The good guys at Kingwin sent me their hard drive cooler to test out. This is not a tinny, lightweight unit by any means – it is a beefy with two quiet, 40mm fans delivering about 10 cfm of cooling air.

It has 20 fins which serve to keep the tray and the drive cool. The fans blow air over the fins and the drive body to cool it down. This pic show where the drive fits into the cooling chassis:

It’s upside-down, as the cooler is inserted into a 5.25″ slot with the fins up. The cooler comes with screws to secure the drive into the cooler chassis and then to secure it to the 5.25″ slot.

This shot shows it installed:

It is not as long as a CD ROM, so there is no space issue. As this pic shows

it’s a nice looking unit; it bows out slightly at the center, about 3/8″.

To see what the cooler can do, I taped a thermocouple on the top of the drive and measured temps before and after. The drive is an IBM 7200 rpm model which runs warmer than I like. I ran the PC for about an hour each time, opening and closing image files and cruising and downloading files over the net, to get the drive warm and to a stable temp. I then recorded before and after temps.

Adding the cooler dropped drive temps by about 4 C. In looking at it, I think it might even be possible to increase performance by using thermal grease along the sides to get a better contact between the drive and the cooling chassis, although it’s not something I would do (most likely you’ll get some dripping).

However, the chassis remains cool to the touch, so it does its job nicely. For some of the hotter 10,000 rpm drives, something like this could be a life-extending product.

If you have a hot drive, this cooler can do you some good; it’s quiet, beefy and will drop drive temps. Very easy to install and nice looking – not a bad product!

This unit is available for $23 from Crazy PC, one of our advertisers.

Email Joe