I have this very bad habit of wanting to pull things apart and find out how they work… so why stop now! There are three screws; one directly below the storage door and two located under the rubber feet at the front two corners. Once these are taken care of, it is a matter of pulling the plastic housing out of the aluminum shell.
Looking at the now exposed NotePal, you can see that the fan grills and rings are mounted to the fans them selves and not the aluminum shell. The second picture shows that the fans are using only two wires each that are then spliced together into a two pin Molex connection. These obviously do not have a RPM monitoring wire and do not interface with the USB other than for power.
Here is a close up of the power leaching that the fans do to the USB ports. You can see that the USB contacts are simply jumped from one to the other thus making the NotePal impartial to which USB port you choose to plug in the USB patch cable for power.
Removing the rings and fan grill mesh from their homes was as easy as pulling them up and out. They are simply held in by two tabs that extrude out from the mesh.
With the grills out of the way, you can now see the fans. These are 70mm x 15mm sleeved bearing fans and run at an estimated 1500 RPM. The fans’ model number is A7015-20CA-2PN-F1 and the fans have eleven fins. These fans are estimated to put out a whopping estimated 9.5 CFM at 21dBA each! I know that they are only a 15mm fan, but I would think that with today’s fan technology we could be seeing some better airflow.
In this shot, you can see the amount of venting that the NotePal has to let cool air in.
These two pictures show the one piece of aluminum that makes up the top shell. You can also see the mount bar that is formed into the shell.
