Legit Reviews

Vigor Gaming is known for providing custom built gaming systems, but they also have cooling components. Today, we are looking at Vigor’s newest hard drive cooler, the iSurf II. The iSurf II is a 5.25” bay active cooler for your 3.5” hard drive and is designed to reduce your hard drive temperature while increasing hard disk drive performance. Join us as we see how the iSurf does on our test bench.

Quote: "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..."

Article Title: Vigor iSurf II Hard Drive Cooler
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/751/1/

betcha that would look sweet in my armor surprised its not that noisy as all the 40mm fans ive used are quite whiny

They are not running all out, just enough to get the job done. I'll try and get a vid of it here in a bit.

Is it me, or would that not look sweet with sweeing red LEDs from side to side along the front?

Okay, maybe too much BSG

don't feel bad I thought the same thing LOL

Sporg wrote: Okay, maybe too much BSG

and thats a bad thing?

martini161 wrote:

Sporg wrote: Okay, maybe too much BSG

and thats a bad thing?

No, I suppose it isn't

Is this really necessary for anything other than maybe the original Raptors?

Its like anything else in a PC the cooler you can make it run the longer it will last. Drives with no cooling don't last near as long as drives with out it.

You might be surprised how warm you drive can get when writing large amounts of data to the drive.

So I guess it goes back to the question of how long do you want to keep it.

Like overclocking, anyone who serious about it will probably have new hardware in a year anyways, which will be shorter than the life span of the hardware.

Either way, it's always good to have options.

Every time you build a system you don't reuse the drives? what do you do with the old ones?

bubba wrote:Every time you build a system you don't reuse the drives? what do you do with the old ones?

My question also ;) as I hold out my grubby little hands

Mike

Wish this would cool even better. I would love to find one that keeps the drive around 25C at load! other than water cooling ;)

KnightRid wrote:

bubba wrote:Every time you build a system you don't reuse the drives? what do you do with the old ones?

My question also ;) as I hold out my grubby little hands

Mike

Wish this would cool even better. I would love to find one that keeps the drive around 25C at load! other than water cooling ;)

Did you ever see google's hard drive report?

Page 6 (fig 5) shows that the drives have less chance of failing at 35-40oC than any other temperature range!
(Of course these were in an 'always on' state and the flux of warming up/cooling down (from powering up/down) is likely to influence those figures).

Dan

DMB2000uk wrote:

KnightRid wrote:

bubba wrote:Every time you build a system you don't reuse the drives? what do you do with the old ones?

My question also ;) as I hold out my grubby little hands

Mike

Wish this would cool even better. I would love to find one that keeps the drive around 25C at load! other than water cooling ;)

Did you ever see google's hard drive report?

Page 6 (fig 5) shows that the drives have less chance of failing at 35-40oC than any other temperature range!
(Of course these were in an 'always on' state and the flux of warming up/cooling down (from powering up/down) is likely to influence those figures).

Dan

That article changed my perceptions!! It would be nice to see a test with drives running 24/7 to see which temp range actually fairs better, but maybe I wont look for such cool drives til someone does that test.

Mike

I wonder just how snug a fit it is for the drive.... if you had some thermal transfer tape on the sides of the drive if that wouldn't help with the cooling at all or not.

Couldn't say if the tape would help. The tape would have to be pretty thick to take up 1/8" gap.