Thermaltake Hardcano 2

Date Reviewed: April 30, 2002
Reviewed By: Jason
Cost: $29.99
Companies: Thermaltake

Installation:

Installation was very basic and easy. place the hard drive in the unit and screw in the sides. As seen before, the 3pin-to-4pin power connector fits very tightly into the drive and takes some careful handling to remove. To avoid possible damage to your hard drive or other component you might plug it inline with, I would suggest to play it safe and plug it into an extra power connector if you have one in your system.

The unit only takes up a single 5 1/4 bay, there is no excess above or below the unit (unlike some of the larger hard drive coolers that mount under the hard drive). Having the 3 1/2 hard drive in a 5 1/4 bay gives it plenty of free space for air to flow around the drive.

With one probe on the hard drive, I mounted the other probe on the bottom of the CPU. Please note this isn't the tape that is included. I had some other tape laying around that I prefer to use. The Hardcano probe is pictured on the left under the CPU. Note how it can't be mounted directly in the middle because the heatshrink tubing needs to clear the CPU pins. The other spot on the bottom of the CPU is where the motherboard thermal probe touches, also off center. The picture on the right is another thermal probe (CompuNurse) I have been using for a while now, I had to take a sharp knife to clear away some excess heatshrink tubing until it cleared the ceramic base of the CPU. I also used a dab of super glue to hold it down, and also tape for good measure.

After mounting the drive in my computer you can see that it doesn't exactly match the color scheme. Even though the front of the unit is supposed to be aluminum, I'm not exactly sure how well it would match up with an aluminum case. People with black or a custom painted case would also need to take some serious consideration before buying one of these.

Testing:

I ran two separate tests to try out the different features of the HardCano 2. The first test was to see how the thermal probe on the CPU did, and the second was to test how well the fan cooled the hard drive.

To test the CPU differences, I recorded the motherboard's temperature probe reading (which I use MBM5), the HardCano 2 temp probe reading, and the additional temp probe that is on the top side of the CPU. Recordings were taken for idle and load situations.

Idle - Windows Booted & Sitting Idle for 15 minutes
Load - Running Prime95 for 15 minutes

The CPU used was a 1.4GHz T-Bird @ 1.89v running on a KT7A-RAID motherboard with a Thermaltake Volcano 7+ to cool CPU.

To test the Hard drive cooling I taped one of the HardCano's probe to the bottom of the hard drive near the motor (which should be the hottest place). Recordings were taken for idle and load situations.

Idle - Windows Booted & Sitting Idle for 15 minutes
Load - Running SiSoft Sandra HDD Benchmark for 15 minutes

The hottest place on the drive is obviously the drive motor, so that is where I decided to mount the probe for these tests. I ran through each test twice, with and without the cooler.

On To Page 3 For Temperatures & Conclusion -->