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Cooler Master's CoolDrive Lite is the most sophisticated-looking solution of the three, and intended to be mounted and visible in a 5-1/4" bay. The CoolDrive also differs from our other two products in that it contains a fan for active cooling.

Following the same design principle of our other two contenders, the Cooler Master CoolDrive is comprised of two large heatsinked sections which come together to form the enclosure. The SilenX Luxurae is the odd one out, though, as the other two products are also designed to behave like heatsinks, while the Luxurae doesn't appear to be.

As with the other products, installation is fairly straight-forward, though there is a component to the installation procedure that I'm not too fond of. Coolermaster supplies a special thermal pad that is designed to be applied to the bottom of the hard drive, for the purpose of transferring heat from the logic board and motor to the enclosure. If the pad were simply a re-usable solid pad, I'd have no qualms with it, but that is not the case.

The pad seems to be made of a similar material to that of what you find on stock AMD heatsinks. While it is not as crumbly as the stuff you'd find on said heatsinks, it is not exactly 100% resilient to stretching/compression. Once applied, you will have to exercise caution when taking it off if you wish to re-use it. I doubt that obtaining replacements is an easy task, so you'd be stuck with a bare hard-drive-to-casing solution after a few uses.

The top plate has a non-removable piece of padding that makes contact with the top of the hard drive when it is installed. I assume this pad to be thermally-conductive, and is more like the kind of thing I'd like to see on the bottom plate.

All in all, assembly is a complete breeze, as with the Luxurae. Once the drive is in the bottom piece and screwed in, the entire unit is raised into the upper shell, and then that is screwed in. I'm never good with words when it comes to describing such a process, so I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. Lastly, you have to decide whether you want to plug the fan in or not. I conducted temperature and noise tests both with the fan plugged in and not plugged in.

I have to say that I'm most attracted to this product, when compared to the other two. It possesses a simple, yet high-tech look that I am fond of.

On to the numbers!