I finally bought a Scythe Kama Bay. It’s a product of solid construction. The 12cm fan it ships with is reasonably quiet, for me, even at +12V. It won’t spin up at all at +5V, but probably will at some higher voltages. It has a dust filter in behind the swiss cheese metal mesh in front. It probably provides better airflow with that removed. (Which I later did.)
It really does take up three full bays. It uses enough of the mounting area that you can’t mount 3.5″ drives on rails inside where the fan sits, so it’s completely dead space in the case. That’s probably by design so the fan has nothing interfering with airflow. Fortunately I have 6 5.25″ bays, so it isn’t really an issue. You can only really cool two drives with this, though. I have it sitting on top of two drives and the drive directly under the airflow is cool, but the drive under that is quite hot. I’m going to move it above the Kama Bay so it is cooled from below. (Since doing so both drives run cool now.)
The four drives in a tightly packaged cage behind the Kama bay and above the PSU in the corner of the case aren’t any cooler with the Kama bay, which I find somewhat surprising. I did replace the two rear 8cm fans with two CoolerMaster fans which must have a lower CFM than the stock 8cm fans I was using, so it could be the Kama makes up the difference.
I think six drives in an old dual CPU P3 system is probably more than the Kama was intended for, so I can’t get away with +5V any of the other fans to reduce fan noise without compromising drive temperature.
Still an entertaining experiment, though.
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Yay! Finally a review with some interesting details. Have been looking at ‘major’ review sites for info on this, but they all avoided mentioning any useful information.
I was looking for a way to get a nice looking front plate with easily replaceable air filter for a Cooler Master 4-in-3, but since you mention that it’s impossible to mount any 3.5″-drives behind the Kama, I guess this one won’t fit the bill. Saved me $20-ish. Thanks!