A long time back I’d pulled a lot of Acard SCSI to ide adapters from a bunch of old Macs. At the time I never thought to use them. They were attached to ide drives. Why use them when I had lots of SCSI drives? Later I thought of using them with ide to CF adapters. So I replaced the drives in a lot of SCSI enclosures with these. Then the only noise was the fan. Lately that’s been bothering me. Going solid state I’ve wondered about even needing the fan. I have a Century Corporation ide to SCSI enclosure that came with a CF adapter and never had a fan.
But I went with quieter lower CFM fans instead. Fans I can just barely hear.
Using CF cards, there may not be any need for a fan, but it depends on usage. Digital cameras that used the cards never had fans, and many embedded systems/industrial computers don't use fans. But the cards do heat up when they are used.
Other solid-state media, like SATA SSDs, seem to heat up much more and may cause overheating if used without cooling. Much of the heat actually seems to be generated in the controller chips.
How warm do the ACARD adapters get? Seems like they have gotten both scarce and expensive these days.
The Acard adapters don’t seem to get warm. I assume there’s some heat coming off the power supply. Still without a 3.5” hard drive there’s a lot of room in the case so I think with a low CFM fan I should me more than fine. Probably fine withno fan.
The Acard adapters have indeed become expensive. Fortunately mine were free. I don’t see my version for sale any more. Mine was made to install under an ide hard drive with a cable coming around to plug into the drive.