Vigor iSurf II Hard Drive Cooler

A closer look and installing the iSurf

With the iSurf out of the box we can start to get a good look at it. The whole cooler is made of aluminum — even the front bezel.

Flipping the cooler over we can get a look at the power wires and the dual 40mm fans. One thing that Vigor did that I really like is that they separated the power for the fans and the power LED. I know lights add to the cool factor, but there are some who dont care for them.

The fans on the iSurf II are reversible. So, if you wanted to, you could change the fans to push air out the front of the case rather than draw in air. To do this, all that needs to be done is to remove the font panel and fans, flip the fans and reinstall.

Looking from the end we can see the shape of the cooler. With the iSurfs cooling fins it will not be in contact with the entire drive surface. Drive coolers that I have used in the past used a flat plate for the drive to set against. The way the iSurf is set up, it will only touch a small amount of surface area of the drive.

Installing the cooler

Installing a drive is very straight forward, but there is something I noticed while putting the hard drive in the iSurf. There is a fair amount of side to side play, almost .125, so if you were to tighten one side down completely then the other side would not touch the drive. The mounting screws are long enough to hold the drive, but there could be a loss of heat transfer through the sides.

Looking from the end the top of the drive rests on the fingers of the heat sink nicely. A flat plate would have made more contact with the drive body. It will be interesting to see how the cooler performs with this small amount of contact.