Thermaltake AquaBay M4 Hard Drive Water Block

Performance

Testing actually took some thought.  Many cases allow for hard drives to be mounted immediately in front of an intake case fan to take advantage of air blowing heat off the surface of a drive.  The variety of cooling fans found as intakes, vary greatly from none up to twin 80mm fans or even large 120mm fans as the Tt Tai Chi had.  To give you as generic view of the AquaBay's performance as possible, our testing was done without any intake fan blowing so this variable that changes from system to system can be taken out of the equation so you can better extrapolate our results.

Using a 120GB Seagate drive, we measured the temperature on the connector side of the drive on its metal housing.  Measurement was done with our in house IR thermometer after 15 minutes of thrashing the drive repeatedly running MS Disk Defragmenter.  Measurement was taken at the exact same point after a similar load simulation following the drive being mounted in the Thermaltake AquaBay M4 HDD Cooler.  This was all done after running the system at 100% load for an hour to heat up the coolant for a more real world measurement.  Chances are if you are thrashing your drive, your CPU will also be under load in a frag session.  Ambient room temperature was 21 degrees Celsius.

Test Bed

• Intel P4 2.4GHz Northwood @ 3.2GHz

• ASUS P4C800E Deluxe mainboard

• HIS Radeon X850XT IceQ II AGP

• (2) 512 MB DIMM of Corsair XMS4400 Memory

• Seagate 120GB SATA HDD

• Generic DVD-RW drive

• Thermaltake Tai Chi Case

• Windows XP Pro SP2

Results

Conclusion

As expected, we achieved a significant drop in temperatures.  Not only is this a good thing for the drive but it helps keep case temperature down by transferring heat so that it is blown out of the system by your water cooling set up.  Installation and quality of the components was first rate.  I especially like to emphasize the long extra lengths of both 1/2" and 3/8" hose that were both UV reactive.  It also needs to be pointed out again that Thermaltake gives you two pairs of connectors; one pair fitting 3/8" H2O kits and the other fitting 1/2" jobs.  Versatile, well made and very practical.  Thermaltake gets a thumbs up for continuing to expand their line of water cooling accessories and components. 

Pros

• Great performance

• Gasket double as vibration dampening

• Fits either 1/2" or 3/8" OD water cooling systems

• Easy installation

• Lots of hosing in both 1/2" and 3/8" included

Cons

• Price and availability questionable at present

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