Tuniq Sanctum Hard Disk Silencer and Cooler Review

It’s been a while since I came by any hard disk cooler. Tuniq sent me a unit the other day and I must say, this unit looks pretty cool but does it cool the harddisk as claimed? Let’s fine out.

The Appearance

The review unit I received was the black version. It looks sleek, it looks cool. It’s light weight but solidly built.

The curved style on the front bezel makes it look like some shade when you look at it from the front. It’s not removable though. Not an issue to anyone unless they’re into changing bezels but hey, you can always paint them. 🙂

The fins at the top panel of the Sanctum expands the overall surface area available for heat dissipation. 2 power cables come along with the package, one SATA and one molex – both are modified versions of your usual connector. The Sanctum also comes with paddings for holding the hard disk, it also serves as the absorber for vibration and noise.

As you can see in the picture below, the padding holds the hard disk nicely regardless of whether you’re using the standard sized hard disk or the slim types. The case does not come with any dedicated holes or devices that establish connection with the hard disk. Instead, you still connect all the power and data cable to your hard disk as normal, it’s just that these cables are given a tiny gap to exit the enclosure.

Technical Data

Here are some details…….

Features:

• 5.25″ bay design
• Suitable for 3.5 inch IDE / SATA HDD
• Large aluminum heatsink helps to disperse the heat from HDD
• High performance thermal pads efficiently transfer the heat to the heat sink
• Airtight housing design seals the HDD noise in it
• Electrically insulated thermal pad on the top and bottom side of HDD
• Suitable for PC, Server and IPC
• For the best cooling performance, we recommend to use HDDs whose height range is from 23mm to 27mm.

SPECIFICATIONS:

Official Product Page

Performance

The tests were done on a Hitachi Deskstar 250GB 7200RPM hard disk.

Since testing the hard disk on different location of the casing wouldn’t be fair, I decided to test the hard disk as the same placement.

Of course, being a 3.5″ hard disk – there’s no way for me to mount it on a 5.25″ bay. So here’s what I did – I used the Sanctum to as the hard disk holder instead. 🙂 First test was done without the Sanctum’s cover. Meaning the hard disk is dissipating heat as normal. 2nd test was done with the cover.

All tests were done within the hour for consistent room temperature, readings were taken by using HWmonitor.

For the first test, the hard disk was left to idle for a while and it maintained at 45°C. To load the hard disk, I used WinRAR to archive 1GB worth of my photos. The archiving process took a little more than 15 minutes (the system is an Athlon64 2800+ with 512MB RAM) and the load temp recorded was 47°C.

After completing this, the 2nd test was tone with the cover placed on the Sanctum. Initial recordings shown it to be 42°C, slowly it went down to 39°C as I left it to idle and it remained at 39°C throughout the execution of the same test.

All in all, the additional surface area helped greatly in heat dissipation while the padding absorbs the vibration and noise from the working hard disk, the magnitude of vibration of the enclosure is much reduced as well.

Conclusion

I must say that I really like the Sanctum. It not only cools the drive, it actually works in keeping the hard disk silent.

Besides that, I love the sheer simplicity of using the Sanctum. I used the Cooler Master CoolDrive 3 before (Yes, I was a reviewer at TechARP, I still hangout there.) and what I didn’t like about the CoolDrive 3 was the amount of screws involved. I had to mount the drive and all. With the Sanctum, mounting the hard disk was easy. Just place the hard disk into the enclosure and seal the top, half the amount of screws involved.

You might be disappointed if you’re looking for something with lights or changeable bezel. To me, the unit got the job done and that’s what counts. 🙂