Hello again, my name is Rodney Reynolds and welcome to another video review. Today I will be looking at the SilentDrive enclosure. This is the product itself; right here is where the hard drive would go installed inside of the unit. I’ll go through how that works a little later on and right here we have a temperature sensor and this goes attached right on through the hard drive,. Now the whole purpose behind a product like this obviously is to keep noise levels at a bare minimum. This unit traps an around 90% of the noise that is generated by hard drives and you can see how it does this, it has acoustic foam here on the cover plate as well as inside the unit.
This is a plastic housing, it also has a couple of aluminum strips here on the inside and right here is where it goes fixed inside of a five and a quarter inch bay inside your case. I’ve removed the acoustic material so you can get some indication how thick it is and what it actually looks like. And once you have everything inside the unit and everything is mounted it will look something like this, the drive of course would be shielded by that acoustic material therefore keeping the noise levels down.
Installing a hard drive in this is extremely simple, what you need to do first though is really monitor the temperature of your hard drive before you put it in here. So you can get some idea about before and after and this is the temperature sensor and you really want to put this somewhere on the drive so you can give at it very easily. So pull out the drive from when it’s inside the unit to just check on the temperature, so the first thing to do is to stick the temperature gauge onto your hard drive and then monitor the operating temperature of the drive before it goes inside of the product.
I will be using this particular read out and temperature sensors really to give you some indication of the room temperature as well as the operating hard drive temperatures. Now the room temperature right now on the right hand side you’ll see is around 26ºC and the hard drive temperature right now is 33 ºC and again this is before it goes inside of the enclosure. Installing the hard drive inside of this is extremely easy to do just be very careful and take your time, you can see the orientation that I have the product and the hard drive, it goes slip in like so, again take your time and push it all the way back to the back.
And once it’s all the way in you have a couple of options at this point, you can put two screws right here which anchor the drive to this particular bracket, this bracket goes attached to the case. Now why would you do that, well you really would want to do this if you’re installing the product inside of the vehicle and you do not want the hard drive slipping out or in a case that you’re transporting a lot. However remember by doing this you’re going to increase the vibrations from the drive itself to the case and that will of course increase the loudness levels on this.
The next thing you want to do is prepare the phone, this is the phone that’s on the front cover plate and if your hole is not punched out here when you get the product just go ahead and punch it out. This is to let the power cable go through like so, you can see here this is the power connection for your hard drive and this is the ITE connection, you can see that once you put it right here you got a place to put the power cable through right there. And now you can clearly see how this works, the power cable goes through here and the ITE cable you can see here is installed on the drive itself will go through the bottom right here and it grooves in this plate that will allow it to feed out through. So I can go ahead now and just push this plate and snap it on over, once you’ve done that your finished the installation. Just to show you how easily this does feed out through the cover plate, again a groove here for the power feed and the ITE connection very simply they feed through the cover plate and as you can see it does work very well.
Now the other thing you can do like I did is install this outside of your system. Normally you would be installing this inside if you do not have a Y-cable splitter for the power. I would recommend picking up one if you're getting this unit because it makes is so much easier to install this outside the unit and then bring it back to connect the ITE cable to the motherboard and then connect it to the power supply. When the drive is inside of the unit, the operating temperature now is around 38ºC. If you remember when it was outside of the unit it was around 32 or 33 ºC so certainly a big jump here in temperature from when it’s outside to inside the inclosure.
Now let me do a stress test on the hard drive and let’s see how high the temperature will go in that case. Now that the hard drive has been inside of the enclosure for some time and right now currently the hard drive is at maximum low, you can see that it’s a whopping 46ºC certainly very hot. Now the maximum temperature recommendations for a lot of hard drives is around 55 or 60ºC, its certainly below that maximum temperature range, however this is extremely hot for a hard drive.
I’ve selected a quantum drive, this is one of the first ATA 17200 RPN drives from Quantum and they use to actually hum quite a bit so this will be a good drive to see the loudness differences between when the drive is outside the enclosure and actually inside the inclosure. Let me increase the audio right now so you can have a listen to it outside the enclosure, and now when the drive is inside the enclosure literally you can hardly hear anything, I'll increase the audio. Overall, this product does do what it’s supposed to do and that is of course keeping your hard drive very-very quiet.
However, there is a big cost here; temperature; very high temperatures and that is to be expected. You put a hard drive inside of all kinds of plastic and acoustic material and seal it up and you're going to get some really high results. This product does need to be improved, you need a fan in there somehow to input the air and exhaust the air really because it needs to have some kind of ventilation at it is very-very trapped inside of there. Temperatures could approach critical and you possibly could lose your hard drive inside of this enclosure, so I recommend this product does need some work.
Again my name is Rodney Reynolds and this has been another video review, be sure to check back very soon I will have a brand new one for you then. Also check out my website www.3dgameman.com and while you're there cruise into the forums, you can go in there or register, registration is free, you can go in there and leave your own suggestions and comments and of course find out all kinds of information about this product and about all the products which I video reviewed. Until the next time take care
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services