120mm 5.25 bay cooler enclosure?

jasonb885 · Post by **jasonb885** » Fri Feb 17, 2006 8:43 am

Is there a decent bay cooloer solution? My six 5.25" bay beast has, well, five 5.25" bays available at the moment and I'd like to dedicate two or three of them to a 12cm fan in some capacity so I can provide some additional cooling at 5V for my six not drives.

Thanks!

Sooty · Post by **Sooty** » Fri Feb 17, 2006 9:05 am

Scythe Bay Cooler or the CoolerMaster 4-3 device.

jasonb885 · Post by **jasonb885** » Fri Feb 17, 2006 10:04 am

Sooty wrote:Scythe Bay Cooler or the CoolerMaster 4-3 device.

Cool. Thanks!

HaloJones · Post by **HaloJones** » Sat Feb 25, 2006 11:31 am

Nice! Anyone know of a UK supplier?

jasonb885 · Post by **jasonb885** » Sun Apr 02, 2006 10:26 am

Sooty wrote:Scythe Bay Cooler or the CoolerMaster 4-3 device.

I finally bought one. It's a product of solid construction. The 12cm fan it ships with is reasonably quiet, for me, even at +12V. It won't spin up at all at +5V, but probably will at some higher voltages. It has a dust filter in behind the swiss cheese metal mesh in front. Probably get better airflow with that removed.

It really does take up three full bays. It uses enough of the mounting area that you can't mount 3.5" drives on rails inside where the fan sits, so it's completely dead space in the case. That's probably by design. Fortunately I have 6 5.25" bays, so it isn't really an issue. You can only really cool _two_ drives with this, though. I have it sitting on top of two drives and the drive directly under the airflow is cool, but obvious the drive under that is quite hot. I'm going to move it above the Kama Bay so it is cooled from below.

The four drives in a tightly packaged cage behind the Kama bay and above the PSU in the corner of the case aren't any cooler with the Kama bay, which I find somewhat surprising. I did replace the two rear 8cm fans with two CoolerMaster fans which must have a lower CFM than the stock 8cm fans I was using, so it could be the Kama makes up the difference. If I run the CoolerMaster fans at +5V then the four rear drives run significantly hotter than without the Kama bay.

I think six drives in an old dual CPU P3 system is probably more than the Kama was intended for, so I can't get away with +5Ving any of the other fans to reduce fan noise without compromising drive temperature.

Still an entertaining experiment, though.