Battleangel | Personal

So, I got a couple of Hard Drive Stabilizers from Scythe as well as the Kama Plus front air intake. It was a bit of a gamble, since my Gigabyte Aurora has all these tool-less solutions throughout the case. I was impressed with all the rails and sliders and whatnot at first but in time I’ve realized what a nuisance they can be when trying to install something out of the ordinary.

Long story short is that both products worked out nicely, and actually did what they were supposed to do. The only remaining issue would be with the models needing to be fastened better, or padded rather, on the right side where you cant use screws (because of the case).

The Hard Drive Stabilizer 2 quieted down the 7200 rpm Samsung T166 (which may be quiet but does vibrate a lot). You can just touch the case now and feel that it is actually vibrating less, even with an additional disk mounted. However, the problem was that moving the drive to a 5.25 inch slot raised its reported idle temperature by a few degrees. Your mileage may vary and might be higher still if you’re going from screw mounts where the heat can transfer into the case. I don’t remember exactly what the temp used to be but I would guess around 32 degrees Celsius maybe. Now it was at 37 degrees. Pretty much the same as the Seagate ST3750330AS that I have running in that cramped SFF case. Ouch.

So it’s a good thing I bought the Kama Plus then. I got it in place, booted into Windows again, and saw a remarkable improvement with virtually no extra noise. The drive temperature dropped like a stone down to 28 degrees. And even the 5400 rpm Samsung F2 sitting in a drive cage below the 5.25 inch cage dropped a degree or so, from 26 to 25 degrees. And all of this with a room temperature of about 25 degrees.

In closing, I can only say that I’m also very impressed with the quality of these products. Build quality is solid, and in the case of the stabilizer, the rubber is soft enough (unlike some competing products) that so that it will actually dampen drive vibrations.

Addendum: I would still like to offer a word of warning to other people with tool-less cases. The HD Stabilizer can cause a nasty racket when coupled with a lax fastening mechanism and / or a difficult drive, like the T166. Initially I was very pleased, but after a day or so I started picking up an awful noise propagating through the case, especially when doing massive random reads. I put some padding around the drive and hope that it will be better from now on. As such, I’m not all that pleased with the HD Stabilizer anymore and I’m wondering, since I had to get hands on with the suspension anyway, if it in fact had been better to do my own suspension out of rubber bands or whatever. Could also be that this particular hard drive is hopeless. Still very pleased with the Kama though. Though equally iffy in tool-less cases, it doesn’t resonate like a hard drive.

More pictures over at Picasa.