The 2 most dangerous elements for any drive are heat and dust. While the drives are in use, they generate a significant amount of heat. In order to prevent the drives from overheating and burning out, a fan is needed to pull the hot air out and suck in fresh air to cool the drives down. The fans built inside of a SharkCopier use a ball barring system, instead of the cheaper plastic solid fans used by many other duplicators, to ensure stable and continuous ventilation. The problem is, the fresh air has no means to enter the duplicator other than through the front of the unit going directly through the front of the drives. This causes the second major threat to a drive, the culmination of dust on the laser head. Unless you’re working in a completely dust free environment, there will be dust particles in the air. As the air is sucked through the front of the duplicator those dust particles will collect inside the drives and cloud the laser head. The laser head is the optical nerve center of the drives and conducts the process of burning onto the discs. Just as if your eye glasses developed a built up layer of film and dust on the lenses it would be harder to see through them, the same is true for the laser head. As the dust accumulates it makes it harder for the laser to perform forcing the drive to work that much harder and reducing the lifespan of the drive. The SharkCopier is specially designed with a special “gill” venting system on each side of the case to allow the air flow into the machine without passing through the drive face. This eliminates approx. 80% of the harmful dust from entering into the drive itself and landing on the laser head. To further prevent dust from entering the drives, the SharkCopier is equipped with exterior drive door covers to block harmful dust particles. These drive covers keep the dust out and provide an attractive uniform look for the duplicator itself. In addition, since the case is made out of aluminum, it gets rid of the harmful heat up to 3 times faster than a standard steel case.