GUP Japan Smart Drive HDD Silencers

	Smart Drive Classic Cooper HDD Silencer [13 in stock] Review this product	€111,67
	Smart Drive 2002C HDD Silencer [172 in stock] Review this product	€66,99

The issue of noise from hard drives has remained a long-established barrier to the dream of owning a silent PC. The whir and whine from a drive's constantly-spinning platters and clicking from its head-seek can soon become annoying to anyone who values a quiet life whilst they use their PC. And pity the user whose PC has more than one drive! As you would expect, we have offered several solutions to this problem over the years, but we have yet to come across a product as effective as the Smart Drive from an unusually-named Tokyo-based company called "Grow Up Japan".

The Smart Drive is a tidy-looking acoustically-sealed enclosure for any 3.5" hard drive which can then be mounted in a standard 5.25" (DVD drive-sized) bay. However, what makes the product stand out is its attention to detail as far as design is concerned. Its enclosure and mounting designs are pure genius, and it uses copper plates (which are twice as conductive as aluminium) to extract heat. In fact it is so efficient at extracting heat that some hard drives can actually run cooler in a Smart Drive than if they were running without one!

Other HDD silencing products tackle the issue of heat extraction in a variety of ways, including the use of heatpipes, vented openings and fan-assisted cooling. However, the Smart Drive uses none of these compromises and delivers both brilliant silence and excellent cooling. Even toasty-running 10,000 and 15,000 rpm hard drives such as WD's Raptor series can be safely silenced! In fact, using the product with these incredibly loud drives gives a very dramatic benefit, so at last you can have both performance and quietness.

For anyone who still remains unconvinced that the encasement of a hard drive is a good idea from a reliability point of view, in February 2007 Google produced a research publication which examines the reasons for failure on over 100,000 of its consumer-grade hard drives. The paper sent shock waves through the IT industry when it flew in the face of conventional wisdom and concluded that in fact "there is a lack of consistent pattern of higher failure rates for higher temperature drives, or for those drives at higher utilization levels".

One other problem with some cheaper HDD enclosures is that they do nothing to dampen the low-frequency vibrational noise from the hard drive. This typically manifests itself as a hum or rumbling noise, and can be amplified by the PC chassis. However, the Smart Drive addresses this issue very effectively through its use of soft heat-conductive rubber and sheer mass - the product weighs 1.1 kilograms! And one other benefit of using a hard drive enclosure is that the product brings benefits in terms of sealing the drive from harmful effects of dust.

The Smart Drive has undergone several minor design refinements over its lifetime and has now reached the pinnacle of a brilliantly engineered and executed solution. Despite its high price, sales in Japan and the USA have now reached nearly 100,000 units and we are proud to bring this product to the UK for the benefit of customers who demand the best. And because it is built like a tank, we are sure you will enjoy the benefit of the product for many years to come as you transfer it from PC to PC when you upgrade. Definitely a Smart Choice!

Smart Drive Classic Cooper

Also available is a full copper special edition Smart Drive called the Cooper. Yes, we thought it was a spelling mistake too but apparently not, or at least not any more. When Grow Up Japan first announced this limited edition, they mis-spelt the product name on the English version of the press release. They called it "Cooper" instead of "Copper".

Many journalists and websites picked up on this typo and found it humorous, but by then it was too late to do anything about it. So Grow Up Japan decide to "go with the flow", and formally renamed the product Classic Cooper, in memory of the famous Mini Cooper which was itself a souped-up "ultimate" version of the original classic Mini car. The Mini is extremely popular in Japan. Spookily enough, the Smart Drive Cooper weighs a whopping 1964 grammes, and 1964 was the year that the Mini Cooper first won the famous Monte Carlo rally! But we think this is probably just a co-incidence...

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