XSReviews

Introduction

With CPU’s under peltiers and graphics cards connected to your mains water supply, hard discs are left to sweat in the corner of your case. Heat and HDD’s don’t mix; you end up with a shorter life span which means more expenditure. To counter the temperature onslaught, Jetart have created a simple hard disc cooler which should end your woes…

Specs

The coexistence of high temperature with the high-speed operation of the HDD has become a nightmare of computer user. It always leads to computer breakdown and damage of data built through long-term hard work. This product is a high-performance cooler specifically developed for high-speed 3.5” HDD. The main body is made of highly conductive aluminium alloy and is equipped with powerful quiet fan. It not only increases the operating performance but also extends the operation life of the HDD.

Rock star hard disc; complete with its own fan

In the usual Jetart blister pack, the HCA06 is shows as quiet and cool, which are the two main things that people look for in cooling devices.

Once unwrapped, you don’t get a great deal; the HDD cooler itself and 4 screws. The instructions on how to install the cooler are on the back of the packet saving money for Jetart and the paying customer.

The cooler itself is a simple extruded aluminium heatsink, with four screw holes to attach to your hard disc, and a small 60mm fan which blows towards your HDD. The fan connects to your power supply by a pass-thru molex, which means that you aren’t going to lose any connectivity.

It looks pretty good, with white text printed on the surface showing the Jetart brand name, and that it’s a ‘HDD Guard’. This device wouldn’t look out of place in any PC. The black anodised aluminium will blend in with your hard disc.

Installation

To install the HCA06, you have to take your hard disc out, flip it over and screw the cooler to the bottom. This could be a problem where these screw holes are used to mouse the hard disc in your case, but this is rare. The cooler is slim and should easily fit back into your case without any issues.

The packet says that you shouldn’t use the cooler if you have a very close adjacent drive as it will reduce the fans efficiency. It also goes on to say that you should only use the packaged screws as any other could damage your hard disc.

Annoyingly, that means that you’ll lose a drive bay, but this is a less intrusive design than say the Sytrin HDD cooler.

Testing

A low-level hard disc scan was run for 30 minutes with and without the HCA06, and then the hard disc was left to idle for 30 minutes with and without the cooler. The average temperature was then recorded.

The disc used is the same; a standard SATA I 80gb Western Digital drive.

When in use, the HCA06 can’t be heard at all; it’s pretty much silent. However, the fan is obviously underpowered as there wasn’t a great deal of difference between load temperatures. This difference was greater whilst the drive was idling and that’s pretty much what your hard disc does most of the time. Only during an antivirus scan or a defragment will your hard disc be fully used.

Conclusion

The Jetart HCA06 HDD cooler is a simple product, its quiet, cools reasonably well and by the looks of it, quite inexpensive. Perhaps now is the time to save the horror of a failed hard disc and invest a couple of Benjamin’s in this unexciting, yet invaluable product.

Pros	Cons
Simple	Not great temperature difference
Easy to install
Silent

I’d like to thank Jetart for providing us with the HDD cooler.

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