Silverstone TJ04-E Evolution Case Review

One of the key features of the new TJ04-E is support for 8x 3.5" hard drives in the specially designed hard drive rack.  We got to see this feature at CES 2012 and were quite impressed with the new configuration.

To access the new rack you first need to remove the four screws and pull the rack towards you.  Silverstone has included a grab handle since eight hard drives can become quite heavy.

The rack does feature noise isolation foam to keep vibrations down but works best to simply keep the drives from moving around once they have been installed.  You will notice that the mounting holes are very close together.  This is how they can fit eight hard drives into a location that would normally only support five.

To illustrate how close the drives will be we have installed three drives side by side and as you can see there isn't much room between them.  The final step will be to install the cooling fin that both acts as a heatsink and a support.  All of the drives will tend to support themselves once everything is locked down.

The hard drive total divides up nicely into two groups each with their own heatsink and SATA power distribution cable.

As with any change from the normal the question comes up as to why make a change when the old way worked just fine.  We have always believed that computer components need to be cooled if they produce heat.  This is true of CPUs, GPUs, chipsets and memory.  However, there was always a debate on if hard drives really need to be cooled and if so, how much cooling was actually required.  For answers to this we can look to the one of largest and most active datacenters in the world, Google.

Google published a report on failure trends in a large disk population which touches on a correlation of hard drive failure to temperature.  The purpose of this is to determine if their data centers were being kept too cold or two warm and find if there was a balance between data center costs and longevity of the hardware.

In this report Google determined that over the course of 9 months drives tended to fail less when kept warmer than those that were keep in a cooler environment.  Of course there was as reversal of this trend when drives were extremely warm either due to the environment and/or constant use.

It would seem that Silverstone has designed this new style hard drive rack in response to the findings by Google to give the user more options when it comes to 3.5" drive storage.