I already mentioned how we actually got this product. I was looking for a Serial ATA extension cable so we could hook up a 3.5" SATA drive to a notebook, which typically features a slide-in connector instead of a conventional SATA port. Scythe's Quiet Drive wasn't quite what I wanted, but it came bundled with such an SATA extension cable. Achim luckily found that the Quiet Drive in fact does an excellent job of dampening drive noise while not overheating your valuable drive.

The Quiet Drive comes with all cables you might need, so it works with either a Serial ATA or an UltraATA hard drive. Your hard drive has to be installed into a little tray, which is then placed into the acoustically insulated frame. The top and bottom covers didn't turn out to be excellent heat conductors, but the insulating material obviously is. The two hard drives we tried (7,200 RPM and 10,000 RPM) did not get noticeably hotter than when they were run on our hard drive test bench (which is in open air). Please check out our temperature measurements below.

Pros:

• Excellent acoustic properties: hard drive noise is noticeably reduced.
• Good thermal design, so drive temperature remains within normal levels.
• Works with Serial ATA and UltraATA drives.

Cons:

• None yet.

The reason why we got the Quiet Drive was this SATA extension cable, which we needed to connect a hard drive to a SATA connector inside a notebook. As you don't want any cable inside a notebook, the connector has to be the female counterpart to the hard drive instead of a conventional SATA port.