Measuring temperatures of sensitive system parts like your hard drive, video card, cpu and inside your case you do need some sort of temp sensor. Relying on a motherboards built-in sensor along with motherboard monitor is what most use but as we know those onboard temp sensors are not always accurate. So what do you do, you get a temp sensor like this KHD-401T. This particular one also has an included hard drive cooler along with an LCD display showing the temperature of one device.

• Fits in standard drive bay
• 40x40x10 fan, 12VDC, 3.95cfm, 25dBA, 5000RPM
• Thermal sensor with LCD display.
• Thin sensor probe to measure device temperatures in tight places.

As you can see from the above picture a hard drive screws right in the tray and then you just slide the tray in standard 5-1/4" drive bay. Then secure the tray to the case along with placing the sensor wherever you want it by using either the included small stickers or electrical tape. Very simple and non-complicated install as it should be for something like this.

The fan blows cool air in at a rated 3.95cfm and that ain't much help actually and especially since it is just the one fan and not at least 2 providing a more even cooling. However it seemed where ever I placed the temp sensor on the hard drive it did lower the hd temperature by 1-2 degrees than without the fan, so it does help some anyway. Having that LCD display is sure nice and the only bad thing is it has no light.

The only bad thing about the temp sensor is it isn't long enough to reach the core on an AMD cpu. It will if the cord overlaps the cpu some but then that interferes with the heatsink touching the core so that's a definite no no. In fact I tried doing that with another temp sensor I had and all I accomplished was a non-working sensor afterwards since that crushed the cord. So what we need here is either a longer temp sensor(and as far as I know they don't exist) by just half an inch or we have two other possibilites. Use a heatsink with an included temp slot as the Senfu has or bore a hole in the heatsink to place the sensor. Otherwise to get cpu temps all you can do is attach it as close as you can to the core or to the heatsink, and that's better than nothing. If using the sensor to monitor a video card, case temp or hard drive temp then naturally that will be very simple. And trust me, the cord is long enough to fit any part in any case. This is basic, but basic is what's needed and this device does it just fine.

I'd like to thank Crazy PC for supplying me with this nice and very useful device for this review. Direct link to the $19.95 KHD-401T HDD Cooler with Temperature Monitoring.

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