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     The majority of hard drive coolers that we've featured have all been a typical 5.25" drive adapter with cooling fan(s) perched in front of a single 3.5" or 2.5" hard drive. Some of them even got fancy with a filter or some other barrier to stop dirt and debris from having a free path to your PC's internals workings. Others had lights, buttons, dials, sirens and even LCD panels to control the weather inside your PC. Well, in the world of flashy PC enclosures that have more lights and windows then a big city high-rise, it may be hard to find functional yet conservative accouterments that fit your particular computing needs.

     The iStorm-7 from I·Star was originally designed for rack-mount servers that need flexibility and demand space management. While the iStorm 7 will occupy two full 5.25" inch hard drive bays, it adapts this space to mount three 3.5" hard disk drives. Plus, it has a removable/washable filter and is cooled by an 80mm fan. Available in two colors (beige or black)  the iStar 7 is totally devoid of any noise making gadgets, LCD panels, or flashy lights.

     The door on the external portion of the iStorm 7 simply swings down to reveal the fan and filter material. Both the fan and filter can be replaced by any number of products that are readily available on the market today. The fan is a standard chassis fan (80x80x25) with a 4-pin Molex "Y" connector. The filter material is very similar to what you might find at any decent  hardware store. There are 16 screws that come with the iStorm 7 that are to be used to secure up to three drives in the iStorm 7 chassis, and to mount the iStorm itself into the PC.

     Installing the individual hard drives into the iStorm 7 is very much like installing them into a standard chassis. there are even slots that are designed to allow a screw driver to access the deeper recessed holes such as those pointed to on the bottom of the picture above. Note that the two hard drives on bottom are full size 3.5" hard drives while the drive on top is a slim-line.

     The iStorm 7 maximizes available room as demonstrated  in the above photo - there is clearly very little clearance between each of the installed drives in the frame. Considering most hard drive adapters/coolers only give you one drive per 5.25" drive bay, this arrangement is incredibly effective. The iStorm 7 is completely compatible with PC chassis' that use drive rail system but could give some users a headache if the 5.25" drive bays have small tabs that are supposed to support individual drives. Those small tabs are easily removed by a steady hand with a Dremel tool.

     Performance

     The iStorm 7 fan is VERY quiet which means it's operating at a very low RPM. The electrical stats are rated at 12volts x .14Amps for 1.68 Watts of power consumption. A search on the model number printed on the fan (D80SM-12) reveal this fan to be a Yateloon DC ball bearing fan rated at 2500RPMs for 24 CFM airflow @ 30dB noise threshold. In other words, just another 80mm fan. The performance yield with this fan is exactly what one would expect, quiet operation with a rather minimal effect on cooling.

     This can be viewed two ways;
     First) Though labeled as a "Heat Terminator Kit", the iStorm 7 is best suited as a hard drive adapter allowing 3 hard drive to be fitting and easily removed as one unit from any PC enclosure. It's quiet operation in a stock configuration greatly enhances its value in an environment where annoying background noises would be unwelcome.
     Second) The performance of the iStorm 7 could be greatly enhanced by substituting the low speed fan for any widely available and high speed 80mmx25mm fan. However, this would also raise the noise threshold significantly.