Introduction
A PC enthusiast will probably invest time and money in aftermarket cooling parts for his or her CPU, GPU and chipset. Many will even pimp out their rigs in neon or black lights to increase the bling-bling factor. Most of today's stylish PC cases are windowed so that you can show off your rig's internals, and those windows almost always focus exclusively on the motherboard. That's where all the performance comes from, right?
Well, not quite. To the bottom right of those windows, just beyond what the eye can see, lies perhaps the most important component of your PC. If you ever had the misfortune of having one fail, you quickly realize that it does the most critical job of all: it stores your valuable information. Let's face it, hard disks are the unsung heroes of the PC world.
Fortunately, the Sytrin corporation has not turned a blind eye to our unsung hero. The company has begun to make a name for itself in the cooling world with the excellent KuFormula VF-1 Plus graphics card cooler and their interesting air-conditioned Nextherm PC cases, and has now released an interesting product for hard disks. That product is the SHF1 Hard Drive cooler, and it not only cools your hard drive, but looks really great while doing it.
The SHF1 Hard Drive Cooler
The Complete SHF1 Package
The SHF1 is made for the 5¼" drive bay, so it's roughly the size of a CD-ROM drive. Moving the hard drive from the small 3½" space into the larger bay gives the SHF1 more room for the airflow it needs to cool the drive.
The SHF1 is a fairly simple design, but it does the job. Essentially, it's a simple frame to suspend the hard disk in the middle of the bay, allowing for airflow around the drive. There is also a large heatsink to provide increased cooling area for the drive. In theory the airflow could be passive, but for better cooling performance there are two 40 mm fans included in the SHF1.
At the front of the SHF1, there is a stylish grille for air intake behind which the fans are mounted. These fans illuminate blue lights when active, which is a nice touch. The grille comes in four different colors: silver, black, yellow and red. Yes folks, the noble hard drive has finally been provided with some bling bling to show off.
The silver and yellow versions of the SHF1