Vigor iSurf II Hard Drive Cooler

Testing and Conclusion

The hard drive I will be using to test the cooler is a Western Digital Caviar WD2500 250GB SATA hard drive. Temperatures were taken using a drive utility called Active Smart 2.6 which utilizes the S.M.A.R.T. technology in the drive. To test the drive, I let the system idle for 1 hour, and then copied 30GB of data to the drive to get it heated up. This was done with the drive in 3 configurations:

• Bare drive in the case drive cage without any cooling.
• Bare drive with a 120mm case fan installed on the drive cage.
• With drive cooler and installed into the 5.25 bay.

All temperatures where taken with an ambient room temp of 22 degrees Celsius (72F). The rest of the test system is as follows:

• Motherboard: Intel 975XBX2
• CPU: Intel Q6600
• Ram: Kingston Hyper-X DDR2 KHX9600D2/1G
• Hard Drive: Western Digital 250gb SATA
• Case: Ultra M998
• Power Supply: PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Quad

Results

At idle the iSurf II and case fan were even at 25*C. With the drive under load, the gap widened just a little with the iSurf II coming out on top at 29*C. The case fan configuration was only a couple of degrees warmer at 31*C. As it should be, the bar drive with no cooling was the worst at 33*C.

Conclusion

The iSurf II from Vigor has an MSRP of $29.99 and a quick search on our shopping link shows that it can be found for less. For that price you get a solid attractive piece of hardware. Despite having two 40mm fans, it is rather quiet. Even with the test system sitting on top of the bench and the iSurf II at the same level as my head it was not noticeable over the rest of the system.

The LED can be a little bright for those of you who set your system on top of a desk. It is strong enough to light up the wall across the room from my test bench with the over head lights off. This can be adjusted in a couple of ways. One way is to not even hook up the LED, or move it up or down between the fans so the front bezel will act as a light diffuser.

Legit Bottom Line: The new iSurf II is good performer, even better than a 120mm case fan, and an upgrade that wont hurt your wallet any.