Vantec Vortex Hard Drive Cooling System

Just to the left of the LCD is the door that encases your pre-installed filter. Children and small fingers were not a consideration when designing the front of the unit. It is very easy to stick your fingers through the plastic and touch the fan.

From the rear (get your mind out of the gutters) you will notice that the unit doesn’t have a back to it. It’s completely open. This is by design. Put some thought into the process: You are Vantec and you want to create a product that can be sold through many avenues. Why limit the product to IDE, SATA, or SCSI. The purpose of the open end is so that a person purchasing the unit can use it for a wide variety of platforms. This is a great idea because it doesn’t limit your options (which I LOVE) and it also adds yet another intake fan for the entire computer.

Inside the unit your hard drive rests completely on 4 rubber feet located directly in front of the crossflow fan, which keep the drive off the bottom of the cage and allow air to pass freely around the entire drive. They have a second purpose as well; they help stop some of the very annoying vibration noise you might get from high speed drives. This is a good benefit to those who are attempting to create a virtually quite computer. You might be saying, “Rubber grommets can do the same thing,” and yes, you are right to a certain degree. You will stop vibrations with rubber grommets if your case is built well. Most cheap tin cases will still create SOME vibrations no matter how many grommets you use.

This unit sports a crossflow blower which sways from conventional hard drive cooling designs. This allows one fan to cool the entire surface of the hard drive. Most other designs use small radial fans which measure only 40mm and push very little air. They also provide dead spots in air flow. Some people might lead you to believe that this is a major drawback, the dead spot that is. In some ways it is, in others it doesn’t really matter. Let me explain. If you look at your hard drive; go ahead, it’s alright; you will notice that it looks like one big heatsink (with the proper perspective). Well, guess what, IT IS!!! Its passive cooling, and all we are doing here is creating an ACTIVE cooling environment to secure that our hard drive doesn’t stop working due to overheating. Now the purpose of a heatsink is to spread heat from one spot to cover a large amount of surface area. This surface area can then be cooled more efficiently. More surface area equates to better cooling. This crossflow blower simply covers more area at a time than coolers using 1 40mm fan.