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jmroberts70
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Oct 15, 2002
- Messages
- 2,953
So I've been using external enclosures for a couple of years now as I am a mobile digital DJ on the weekends and work completely off a laptop with an external drive for all my music. Well I've always noticed the external drives get a bit warm (to say the least). When I upgraded to a 500GB drive is when they really started getting hot so I began lookin for an enclosure that had excellent cooling abilities. I managed to find the IONE drive at my local Fry's and thought I'd take a chance. I had my eye on one at newegg.com for a while but I found their mfg. website specs said that they only could handle up to 400GB drives. But since I work near Fry's, I thought it was worth the risk as I could easily take it back. Well to my surprise, the drive works like a champ with my 500GB disk -and quite cool to the touch now!
Well a close inspection of these two enclosures will show the important differences...
Size is the first impression you get. There's a LOT more aluminum on the new enclosure.
Here's one of the all-important differences: ACTIVE COOLING! Also note the network connection. This is a nice feature but I didn't get this enclosure for that purpose. I'll talk more about that shortly...
And here's the biggest difference of all: ACTUAL METAL CONTACT!! The cheap enclosure uses a plastic tray to hold the drive in place. The aluminum housing gets close but barely touches the drive at all. The fact that the enclosure was getting hot at all is purely through convection and radiation as opposed to to actually acting like a heatsink. Now it's hard to see from this shot but the top cover on the enclosure on the right is actually concave. This means that, when mounted, it pushes down on the drive in place to get the best possible metal-to-metal contact for heat transfer. Bravo!
SUMMARY AND NOTE: Well worth the money! My investment in a large capacity drive is well protected from thermal damage now. Recently I contacted the manufacturer (once I found out they are located here in Southern California) and asked them more about this product. If I was buying this guy for network storage (which it only does if the drive is formatted in FAT32 currently), I'd wait for the next version of this item to come out. I was told they should have it ready in a couple of months. They're working on a way around the FAT32 limitation as well as possibly a gigabit network connection (SWEET!). If they hold true to their word, this could be the best all-around external enclosure you can get! We'll see...
Well a close inspection of these two enclosures will show the important differences...
Size is the first impression you get. There's a LOT more aluminum on the new enclosure.
Here's one of the all-important differences: ACTIVE COOLING! Also note the network connection. This is a nice feature but I didn't get this enclosure for that purpose. I'll talk more about that shortly...
And here's the biggest difference of all: ACTUAL METAL CONTACT!! The cheap enclosure uses a plastic tray to hold the drive in place. The aluminum housing gets close but barely touches the drive at all. The fact that the enclosure was getting hot at all is purely through convection and radiation as opposed to to actually acting like a heatsink. Now it's hard to see from this shot but the top cover on the enclosure on the right is actually concave. This means that, when mounted, it pushes down on the drive in place to get the best possible metal-to-metal contact for heat transfer. Bravo!
SUMMARY AND NOTE: Well worth the money! My investment in a large capacity drive is well protected from thermal damage now. Recently I contacted the manufacturer (once I found out they are located here in Southern California) and asked them more about this product. If I was buying this guy for network storage (which it only does if the drive is formatted in FAT32 currently), I'd wait for the next version of this item to come out. I was told they should have it ready in a couple of months. They're working on a way around the FAT32 limitation as well as possibly a gigabit network connection (SWEET!). If they hold true to their word, this could be the best all-around external enclosure you can get! We'll see...