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Home Brew Hard Drive Silencer/Cooler
infodragon writes "As I was looking for ways to silence my system I ran across this article demonstrating a sandwich approach to silencing and cooling a hard disk. Quite a novel idea compared to other silencing techniques!"
I always hold my drive between my legs while I'm using my system. The vibrations and heat lead to an enjoyable computer experience.
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
This article is old but good. A great way to cool any HD is to sandwich it between two huge slabs of aluminum, sapping heat from the drive and deadening small vibrations, its nice to see some specific results as in the article.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
Use a notebook hard drive with a 2.5 -> 3.5 adapter (and possibly a 3.5 - 5.25 adapter if you like). Less noise, less heat, less power. (Also less space and more money, but oh well).
Silent drive...holy drive...
WRT had disk silencing......
You ask "Why?"
Others would ask "Why not?"
The author of that article now is editor for Silent PC Review. It's also not the first time I've mentioned this site.
I use them for 2 disks. The enclosure works well. It reduces dramatically the whining of the hard disk. The drive runs a bit hot, but within specs. The one in this machine has been on for several months now, and it is still going.
Now I only buy barracudas.
Silencing your PC is like getting into HiFi audio. The curve money spent vs. noise reduction becomes asynthotic.
;-)
"A drawback is that the hard drive heat is basically trapped within the enclosure, and users are cautioned not to use drives that generate more than 6.8 watts of heat."
Oh, boy. A way to make the drives even hotter, which will just accelerate wear that much more. And 6.8 watts? That rules out most hard drives these days.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Not exactly the most efficcient HS ever... but Whatever spins yer platters...
oops, looks like newline's not in this year. Oh well, you get the idea.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
With performance increases of new CPUs getting smaller and smaller these days, tweaking is almost pointless (ie getting a P4 2.6 to 3.0 is a far cry from the old days of getting a P2 300 to 900) so noise is a huge factor for most and justly looked at. Especially since cpus now dissipate like 90W of power and need a monster noisy fan to cool it, having that humming under your desk may be ok for you, but for most they would rather not have it, just ask anyone who works in a real IT lab with a 100k BTU cooling system running over their head to keep a 200 node cluster cool, then you'll know the value of a quite room :)
Good idea. Time for a snack and a beer.
Actually, it looks like a neat idea and quite effective. My systems noise factor and cooling are just fine for me, for now, though.
...Brew.....Cooler....sandwich
Sounds like you are talking about a nice little 2.2 cubic foot Amana, to fit under the desk.
i've been using maxtor hard drives (diamond max series or something) for a while now, and i haven't heard anything from them since i upgraded my 2 giger many years ago. so i automatically assumed all modern hard drives don't make noise.
what does make noise though are the 9 fans in my case. however, when i try to sandwich them i don't get the same temperature benefits like the reviewer does with his hard drive. oh well.
I would love to see a power supply silenter! Even the most quiet ones I have purchased end up being noisy after a while. Possibly a sound dampening breathable material on the vent may be somewhat sufficient.
30% off web hosting. Coupon code "SLASHDOT".
No need to flame, I already realized that I was talking about the wrong product. I'll go stand in the corner....
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
see, there ya go. I could see the need or desire for this in a data center. I can hardly hear people at our centers over the noise. But at home? I whine of a ceiling fan or air conditioning is louder than most systems. I realize it's fun to tweak and see what you can do, but some people act like quietening their system is anything more than just a hobby. I guess I was asking why some people take this particular aspect of system modification so seriously. Rhetorical question I guess, and one that I really shouldn't ask here.
It has a soothing, droning quality. In my home (office) I have a PC that sounds like a harrier (sp) in the midst of full-throttle vertical take-off.
It has a desperate need for cooling with two athlons, four hard drives and two cd/dvd media drives (in a mid-size tower) -- I need all the fans I can get...
Anyway, I like the noise...It gives me a sense of controlling some level of power, power that requires this level of noise to tame...
Just put 4 or 5 computers in your room and you'll never hear the harddrives at all.
--It's Pimptastic!--
...because it makes the drive much larger. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't like resting drives on the bottom of my case because their new heat sink is so big it won't fit anywhere else. For someone with just one drive and plenty of space this may work, but that's pretty much the limit.
I'm sure this is an unusual situation, but if you have to use a computer in the same room as a recording mic, it's trouble. I don't know why everyone else wants quiet computers, but I certainly know why film and audio folks need them.
There is a whole level of "silence" to film foley guys, they really WILL hear a pin drop and it will be an expensive problem.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Silent drive, holy drive
Playing Quake, all the night
Crack new versions, like a script child
On the dvd new mods are filed
Send Grunts to eternal peace.
Send Grunts to e-ter-nal peace.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Aluminum can be cut with a medium tooth blade and a jigsaw. It drills VERY easily as it is soft. Not so soft, however, as to be unable to take threads. You can do it with some scraps of aluminum at home even with modest tools. If you cut threads into the holes you could do away with the nuts on the backside and not have any bolt sticking out.
I don't reccomend using aluminum for this project, however. It would be much better to do it with copper, as it conducts heat better, is denser(even more sound dampening), and you won't have an issue with galvanic corrosion like you will with aluminum on steel parts.
Copper is softer than aluminum, so you'd have to bolt it thru as shown in the picture.
The previous has been a secret message to my comrades.
Parent should be modded as a troll.
At work my cube sits next to our test bed which has roughly 100 (noisy) computers in it running 24/7. I come home and have 2 computers in my room, which is conciderably quieter, but still a far cry from silent.
Asside from the asthetic of a nice quiet work space and living space, there's a very good reason for a silent pc: Home Theater PC's. They're not popular yet, but a lot of people (myself included) have a PC dedicated as a PVR/DVD player/game emulator/etc. If that box is making much noise at all, it can be pretty distracting from your "media experience"
no comment
some people have good ears. And dont like noise.
:) ) i have to hold be breath to hear it.
I got my pc silent enough that at night (its running 24/7 in my bedroom (beeing a student sucks
But its still not transparent. I still feel the noise in the room. Its just isnt annoying anymore.
A normal pc is totally ok if you are at a workplace or during the day, if your typing or gaming. But as a constant background, it should be as low as possible.
My solution: Watercooled CPU with passiv Radiator, 2 12cm case fans at 5V, one cooling 5 hot swap bays with 1 seagate barracuda and 4 Spinpoint V60.
And while the hds were unhearable at first, now i can hear how many drives are running( at least if the barracude is running, there is a hearable difference...)
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
"If you cannot silence this equipment, you may not work in this environment."
I can see it being the difference between having a gig and being fired, in certain film, tv, and audio environments.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
the idea on both links you showed is exactly the same - to increase the mass, so its inertia increases, making the whine from the motor and the seak vibrations displace a lot less of the drive's enclosure. in sum - not a novelty compared to the comercial product. by the way, that's the sleaziest temperature measurement I've ever seen: notice that the temp diode touches the alu plate, as well as the disk - obviously, he's not reading the true disk's temp. to finalize, check out the date of the overclockers.com article, 5/8/01 - that's hardly "news", nor is it for "nerds" because of the way it was put up end of rant (sometimes I just can't take it and stay still)
Moderators: Don't agree? pray tell why.
The hole in the top of the hard drive (used to balance pressure?) would be covered. Which is not cool.
Zalman GPU cooler. Big, bad, silent. :) ...
A Gfx card with one attached feels like a system component of a railgun
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
a hard drive mouted in between two layers of ice cream sandwiches. After the sandwiches have melted, replace them with new frozen sandwiches. That'll keep your drive chilled! However, this approach can get pretty expensive pretty quickly....
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
White noise generator. I haven't heard a power supply, hard disk, CPU fan since I moved into a new building with a white noise generator.
I'm nearing deafness, but those pesky PC fans are a thing of the past.
No more Micro$oft bashing from me. Its like bashing at the special olympics.
Mod parent up! This is so true! :-)
The Bottom Line: My HD sandwich works well. It quiets the HD substantially, keeps it much cooler, and cost me just US$12 to implement.
If you don't count the roughly $11,368.43 of his time spent on implementing, testing, and documenting the solution. I suspect he's an engineer. A programmer would wrap a towel around the drive, pause for a moment, and then say "Yeah, that's quieter." (Note: this is not speculation. I've have seen this.)
It takes an engineer to cook up something like this and then spend 10x the effort to figure out how many dB reduction there was.
-- MarkusQ
Your fan can be always on, as can be your hard drive. The point being, it's a constant, steady noise source, which makes a perfect candidate for active noise cancellation.
Anyone tried it yet? Just record a sequence from your computer, then play it back and keep adjusting the phase until everything's quiet.
Are you kidding? People on the telephone can hear my computer. It's damned annoying, that's why.
You know back in the day, we had a light on the front of the case that indicated when the hard was being read. It was used as a way of determining when the computer was really locked or was just slow as hell -- waiting on IO. After a while a person wouldn't even look at the light, but learned to listen for the drive.
Nowadays there is no light on many cases, and the drive noise is all that is left -- when you can hear it.
I mean, how the hell else am I suppose to know when Winblows is thrashing or the lastest game has locked?
Anyhow, am I the only one that finds a computer's white-noise calming and smoothing?
P.S -- Why the hell don't many newer cases come with a fucking proper reset button!
Instead of trying to make my PC quiet, I just moved it out of my room and into the hall closet.
VGA extension calbes are my friends.
So how much of the heat reduction is due to the aluminum plates, and how much is due to the fact that the hard drive now sits in front of stream of cool, fresh air instead of a stale hot air pocket at the top of the case?
I'd like to see a comparison where the drive is mounted in a practical manner where you can actually move the case without the need to open it up and remove the hard drive first.
And even if the plates are securely fastened to the bottom of the case, it'd still be more informative to provide heat measurements with the hard drive alone positioned in that same location.
Manufactures have now addressed the noise issue and 7200rpm 120+ gig drives can be purchased that are quieter than a whisper @ 10 feet; whisper = 3 bels, or 30db (decibels = tenths of a bel). Sure it does nothing for the heat, but I think hard drive enclosures are a thing of the past, unless you're holding on to that old 6.4gig drive.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
sure let's just label every post you don't agree with "Troll". You've got my vote.
Sorry, just being a smart-ass. Computers are migrating into newer places, like the living room. Try watching a movie with your girlfriend without her commenting on how much louder your computer is (with the Athlon, 5 fans and the 2 120 gig drives) then the old fashioned stand alone dvd player. Vibration is annoying. Thank god for Zalman and their ilk, because once you go PVR you'll never want to go back.. ;-)
Quack, quack.
I've never personally tried them myself on a hard-drive, but for reducing minor vibrations and thus eliminating some amount of sound, rubbers whickers can be very effective. Hunters have been using a similar setup for hundreds of years to reduce the level of noise put out by a vibrating bow string. Some example can be found on this page (look for #95 WHISKER SILENCER). While I doubt the gain from such a technique would be substantial for a hard-drive, gluing a small felt strip to the top of sides of a hard drive should be relatively in-expensive, and could potentially drop your hard drive noise a decibel or two. Personally, I can't hear my drives over the noise fo my fans, so it's not worth the bother for me. :^)
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
I have to look at the power lights to see if it's on.
..........FULL STOP.
I have 4 computers located a few feet from my bed which are on 24/7, and though still noisy, it just doesnt botther me, I guest Ive just dont have that great hearing that others have :(.
I'd love to have a quieter Tivo, as it's currently housed in my entertainment unit.
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Unlike irregardless, there actually is no such word as "costed". :-)
The new Dells with the clamshell tower cases are pretty damn quiet. Nothing fancy, just smart design and a few simple tricks like rubber grommets in the drive rails and a big 120mm case fan that's ducted to the CPU heatsink. Next to it, my homebuilt Athlon sounds like a tornado.
I bought a new Seagate, which is very quiet and nice and planned to remove my old one and silence it somehow. For time being, I removed it from the mounting and placed vertically inside the case so I could mount the new one properly... and then, it went quiet! All of sudden, I don't hear that awful scratching noise, it's all nice, silent... and surprise-surprise - it still works! :)
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I was extremely interested -- not to mention hungry and thirsty -- until I found out it had to do with noisy computers. It's bad enough that junk mail has the same name as delicious luncheon meat.
MOst PSU's are really noisy. I replaced my PSU fan with Panaflo fans and I can barely hear them even up close to them. You could also try the PSU's made by Seasonic - the quietest fan cooled PSUs on the market - much quieter than Vantec /enermax /coolermaster /allied/antec. A bonus for the Seasonic PSUs is that they're fairly more efficient than almost all other PSUs, and that translates in BIG electricity savings if your computer is on 24/7
..........FULL STOP.
Perhaps you should spend more time in school learning how to spell and use proper grammar.
With enough practice, it just comes naturally, like picking up the chicks.
title says it all "tough" guy
On a disk where there is not much write access, ever tried using a large flash drive such as a 2 GB USB flash drive? Sure, it's expensive but there are no moving parts to fail. Oh, and no noise :)
When you look at Moore's law for chips and then look at the performance of hard drives you can see that the hard drive is the biggest non inovative mechanism in your computer.
Holographic storage will be the key but until then why don't these hard drive manufacturers try to innovate by adding more than one read/write head on each platter of the hard drive.
Multipe actuators in hard drives
My gateway box is a lot quieter than it used to be - but I sure don't recommend the method it got quieter by.
:)
Specifically, the power supply fan on it (a lowly Pentium 200) packed it in. I didn't notice for months, so it's evidently not a problem... but it is a lot quieter than with the fan running!
Now I just need to find a Pentium compatible "big block of aluminum" CPU cooler, and I can get rid of the CPU fan too.....
I bought a hard drive cooler/ silencer by coolermaster and it didn't quiet my harddrives noise at all. They claim it silences hard drive noise, but I don't see how it could - it's just a metal case...NOT recommended.
..........FULL STOP.
What if you sleep in the same room as the machine and it acts as a poor-mans server at the same time? I personally woke up with headaches before I quieted my machine down. Headaches first thing in the morning are not good.
Nice and all, but what I need is a way to keep a 3COM Corebuilder 3500 layer 3 switch quite. The dang things keeping me up at night.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
i'll love for you to SHUT THE FUCK UP!
According to this product page copper is much better at resisting corrosion than aluminum if it's subject to a lot of dog urine. So you don't have to worry if you put your tower on the floor where your pet will try to prove Murphy correct.
But assuming you've trained Spot to stay away, copper corrosion is not usually a problem in open air inside a computer case, just look at all the copper heat sinks on the market now. But in places where it can be an issue (such as in water cooling systems) copper is sometimes nickel plated, or a bronze-like allow may be used. For a more serious look at copper and copper-alloy corrosion see this copper corrosion paper. There's also this useful science experiment that explains how having different types of metals touch each other (like copper and aluminum) affects the corrosion rates of each.
I just take my hard drive and keep it in a bucket of water. stays cool and almost no noise. too bad it voids the warranty...fucking apple computer
I work in a computer music and acoustics research lab and we're always after a quieter PC. We've considered a solutions like this, but we've decided it wouldn't really be necessary for long. Here's why.
Among the many reasons for having a hard drive in every computer, two of the big ones were the Microsoft vision statement, and the fact that the network was much slower than disk. The latter is no longer the case.
The fact that network is now faster than local disk is a MAJOR development.
We've experimented with RedHat 9 with nfs root on older hardware with no disk and no fans, with 100Mb bootable NICs. We found to our surprise that they ran faster than with standard (non UDMA) ide. So, we're trying it now with newer hardware and gigabit, and some BIG heatsinks. So far, so good. We can optimize the central storage for speed, and the systems do, in fact, run noticeably faster in most cases, in addition to being nearly* silent.
We hadn't counted on the added bonuses, but there are many. We can change an entire system disk by moving dirs, reexporting, and booting the machine up. Poof, new system. We can install and uninstall packages on machines while they're off! We no longer have two or three extra gigs on each machine, all our nfsroots are from a single physical filesystem (so far) so they all have the same amount of free space, much more efficient! And if a machine offends you, you can yank the plug out. No local fsck!
*Note that the machine is never truly silent. Without any fans or disks, you can still hear a certain noise that sounds like it's happening when the disk used to seek. It's the toroids in the power supply! The network traffic causes HF noise in the power lines, which is filtered in the power supply and causes the chokes to vibrate slightly. The noise is very low, it would easily be drowned out by the quietest of fans, but in a totally silent room with no other PC sound, it's quite audible. There is also some low and infrequent clicking while the machine is warming up and cooling down, due to the thermal expansion of the heat sinks. This doesn't happen during use, when the temperature is more or less constant.
I'm supposed to document all this and I've been lazy, so if you want the rundown on booting redhat 9 without a hard drive, write to my spare address (snotius@hotmail.com) and I'll finish the page and send you the link.
=mortimer
I mean, c'mon! Fan & disk noise are some of the best sedatives I've ever come across, especially on a warm afternoon with just a bit of a breeze blowing through the lab. Get comfortable in your chair, and a high enough level of white noise from your systems, and you'll be out like a light in ten minutes, tops.
;-)
Seriously, folks, this works a lot better than counting sheep (cybernetic or otherwise). Take it from one who knows. Silence that stuff, and you'll have no easy way to fall asleep on your keyboard.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
...a hammer does the trick with much less time and effort.
You have to have somewhere to swap (with windows, its possible to get buy w/o a swap partition in *nix, but still not good). Any flash disk will wear out rather quickly when it handles alot of writes. So harddrives are necessary for desktops. Embedded appliances can get away using a flashdisk tho.
I had a noisy Athlon 1.33GHz and never noticed it. Then they gave me a new Dell GX240 at work. The new Dell's are extremely quiet. Suddenly that Athlon was too noisy to endure.
So my last system was designed to be quiet. I got an Antac Sonata case, Seagate drives, p4 not Athlon, and a video card without a fan. Now I can hear my oggs! There's actually music behind the vocals!
My brother, who owns Alienware, was sincerely impressed by its lack of noise. Usually he wants to run all sorts of benchmarks to see who has the better system. But he didn't care this time, he just wanted to know why it didn't make any sound.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
nuff sed!
that is a straight up unintelligent analysis my friend
(I'm still working on some minor usability issues)
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I want my rig LOUD.
Just like all them hondaboys and bikertwits. I want people to KNOW when I'm computing. I want flames shooting out of the motherfucker, smoke pouring from every vent, and DECIBELS, baby DECIBELS!!!
Make it SCREAM goddammit!
If the sonofabitches on the next block are still sleeping when I'm done downloading a file at 3am then I'm not done with my mods!! RARRRRAGGGGGHHHHAAAAHHOOOOOOOOGAAAAA! Take THAT you pansies!!
Is it fascism yet?
In about a year the first solid state drives will start rolling out. I'm telling you my AMD64 will be silent. Only thing I'll complain about is the waterpump noise :)
Parts needed:
- a gallon sized plastic tub
- a gallon of water
- 1 heavy duty ziplock bag
- small tube of silicone sealant
- (optional) ice
Assembly and implementation is an exercise left to the reader.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Cooling is one thing, but I'm not sure I'd like a hard drive that is too quiet. Usually one can tell if a hard drive is going to become a problem by listening to it. (If it sounds louder than normal, may be a sign to replace the drive before failure.) I managed to thwart a number of situations of data loss by listening to the drive noise for potential problems.
!@#$% whole-grain cereal. When I want fiber, I eat some wicker furniture. - G. Carlin
Just a guess.
-- MarkusQ
I mean, damn - - life is so short. Sandwiching hard drives between aluminum plates?
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
Actually, I wonder if getting two fans to be locked into an alternate phase (both at the exact same RPM) that they can both cancel eachother out... While not 100% effective, it could be the most reliable method given that the motherboard could monitor both noise and RPM levels of all fans and adjust dynamically on the fly.
Life is not for the lazy.
We developed a special high-speed 10+MB/sec parallel port for a customer. We tested the software on our system, and then took it to the customer's site to try out on their spiffy 4-processor Sun.
The test program would read data off one computer and transfer it to the hard drive of another. We hooked it up, and it worked great... then we checked out the setup a little closer... they were using a network drive, not a local drive. The two computers were talking to the same server, connected with fibre. The server was probably a RAID because they did a lot of serious image manipulation, but it was just as fast or faster than the IDE's on our test system.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
My PC has a special button on the front. When I push that it it goes into stealth mode. It goes very quiet and all the lights go out too. Doesn't work too well though in that mode?
That's a nice writeup of an old idea, with lots of pretty pictures. It was a good approach a couple years ago when all hard-drives generated a fair bit of noise. Some drives made today (e.g. Seagate Barracuda IV's and V's (but not the SATA version unfortunately)) are effectively noiseless once placed inside a case that is more than two feet from your ears. (You're not going to hear them over your PSU unless it uses a fanless design such as those from TKPower) The Barracuda's aren't the fastest drives on the market, but if you really need the speed set up a RAID.
The key to making a quiet machine on the cheap is component selection. Don't buy noisy parts and spend money and effort to quiet them down when quiet parts are available. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so to speak.
Copper against steel certainly will cause galvanic corrosion. That's why you don't use iron nails with copper flashing on your roof.
Spam? Delicious? You've obviously never had a hard drive sandwich.
There's more than one way to skin a cat...
Wear headphones, turn the sound up, play MP3's in the background.
Problem solved.
Every platter has two heads already, as they have two surfaces, each being used.
IBM had a line of hard drives with two sets of actuator arms. I don't know if they still make them. All this does though is improve access time. Theoretically it could double the bandwidth, but for that you would have to syncronize quite a bit more, and the read/write actions would have to be to different tracks, which could make data recovery interesting.
For the most part IBM was selling these for their AS400 and higher computer lines. I don't know if they ever considered it for servers and pc's. I think it should be ruled out for laptops. Twice as many actuator parts to potentially fail (very unlikely I know) and double the mass for the actuators to carry around as well.
You never know...
...from their computer? If it is 30dB at 1M / 3ft then that is approaching quiet enough. Just because new drives are a lot quieter doesn't mean there isn't some room for improvement.
That said, in most systems, these new drives would be far from the weakest (or loudest) link. Optical drives are often pretty loud on read, and I'd love to downclock their speed without a contrived app in the system tray. A lot of fans could be replaced with fans of roughly similar CFM rating (a percent or three) but be 3-6dB quieter.
Flash memory cell life span depends on the number of times you erase/write to it. So you want to minimize write on flash devices.
I do use a 4mb ide flash drive to boot my tiny linux router. The only moving part I have in the whole rig is the power supply fan. A noisy one unfortunately.
The IBM drives used in this article are perhaps the most notoriously loud drives out there. I eradicated them from my systems and have found that all the 7200 RPM Seagates are the quietest. I have also used the Silent Drive enclosure (I have two of them) and they work well on drives at 5400 RPM but only some single-platter 7200 RPM drives due to heat generation. Most modern drives allow you to find out their temperature so if you're worried you can monitor it. The Silent Drive does have metal plates that rest on top of the drive to transfer heat to the outside chassis, much like the drives are designed to dissipate the heat. My dealer sold me the Silent Drive enclosure in generic form so pardon me if I write the brand name incorrectly.
But, seriously, after all this jumping around, I have found that the current crop of Seagates using fluid dynamic motors are the very quietest. I'm just talking about noise, whistles, and vibration (clicks do not bother me). The IBM drives are the very worst--you can't convince me that a vibrating hard drive can be relied upon to store data. WD is a little better. Maxtor is very good as well.
If clicks bother you, there are some interesting developments about acoustic management (which only addresses clicks, not ambient noise and vibration). I inquired with several hard drive manufacturers about acoustic management and one of them replied that this feature is under patent litigation and they will no longer be supporting acoustic management. The representative told me that they have elected instead to quiet all their drives across the line.
Seagate has an excellent rebate for their 120 gigabyte 7200 RPM 8 MB cache model at CompUSA right now, incidentally. It is nearly as fast as the Western Digital 8MB "Special Edition" but by comparison the drive is a silent runner with no vibration. I avoid IBM/Hitachi drives at all costs--again, if the drive itself vibrates, what kind of physical stresses are the internal platters and mechanisms being subject to? I don't want to worry about it so they are out of the picture as far as I am concerned.
Kris
Kriston
Normal motor and head noise are nothing on the annoyance scale compared to that buzzy, flangey aging-drive bearing noise. What do you do about that, short of tossing the drive?
The storage density of drives has left Moores law in the dust. Remember the HDD is the fastest mechanical part of the entire computer system! :-)
Holographic storage has been "over the horizon" in excess of 10 years now. Flash is now cost competitive in the sub 1GB region. Want to pay for 120GB of Flash memory? Heads and Disks are the most pricy thing in the drive. Multi head drives push access time down, at a big cost to do.
seagate barricuda 2hp
Should have kept making them. Raid is not great for the desktop.
seagate barricuda 2hp
explanation. Still don't like it. We needed something like this. I did see a Bestbuy computer that had raid by vector i think.
Smart's reporting that my disk drives are running at 37 degrees! Is SMART not accurate? Why did he use an external thermal sensor?
Best Buy can have you arrested
Small as a flea!
Let me also be an advocate of Silent PC Review; if anything, quieting your computer through equipment modifications or replacements suggested on the site could benefit your health through a reduction in background noise.
Losers choose to abuse the use of "loose".
I'm so glad you have 5 hard drives. It's so realisitic to want that rig quiet. :-p
OK, so the Spinpoints might be quiet in small numbers...
For some people, a little nutral noise is good for sleep. And those of us that have 3 or 4 systems in our bedrooms learn to live with the noise.
I have a Sparc20 and an Indy set up like this. Very quiet, reasonably snappy by my standards, YMMV.
Otherwise the juxtaposition of all your noise (and anti-noise) sources will move, path lengths will change, and you'll lose your perfectly balanced superposition. Just a change of a few centimeters will destroy any cancellation at something like 60Hz and greater (right in there with AC motor fundamental freqs), a foot and all the audible frequencies are present... And it never gets back into phase (unless somehow all the distances were exact multiples of some common factor? nahhhh)
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
ACPI
;-)
The OS is in charge now.
How the motherboard presents this discretionary interface (if a manual switch is provided) to the meatspace user is subject to case/motherboard designers' whims.
Usually a pin header on the board provides a physical way to pull down the RESET pin on the CPU, but you might have to add your own. Otherwise, just slide open the cover and jab a screwdriver in.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Well, at night all but the system drive are powered down, so it doesnt matter if there are zero or 4 drives sleeping, at least noise-wise....
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
..Was my best friend's .357 SIG revolver, fired at a range of about 30 feet.
]
However, as you can see, the drive itself had some issues with data integrity after I applied the solution.
[url]http://www.ibiblio.org/propaganda/357[/url
Bowie J. Poag
I've got a server tower next to me which dates back to 1993 with a giant PSU
;)
Rather like a re-heated Concorde takeoff....
I've long since binned my ear defenders as my tinnitis now drowns it out
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
When you look at Moore's law for chips and then look at the performance of hard drives you can see that the hard drive is the biggest non inovative mechanism in your computer.
I think that is not in accordance with facts. The doubling period for disk drive capacity is a bit longer than for ram and CPU MHZ, but not much - maybe two years to 18 months. And there is actually a heck of a lot of innovation going on inside those cases. Just because the brick ismthe same shape does not means that there is no innovation inside, just as the fact that all chips are just lumps of silicon in ceramic packages doesn't mean that there are no innovations in manufacturing. Innovations I can think of include GMR heads, Viterbi encoding, Headerless sectoring, "pixie dust", sputtered media. Haven't heard of these? No, they are just hidden inside a "magic box" you buy. But there is a lot of innovation inside that bland box.
why don't these hard drive manufacturers try to innovate by adding more than one read/write head on each platter of the hard drive.
It has been thought of, and found not to be worth the cost. The actuator/arm/head amplifier mechanism are a significant part of the cost of the drive. It puts more heat inside the enclosure as two arms hurtle back and fourth. Then there are turbulence problems: the airflow from one head disturbs the flow over the other in a way that will vary with the position of the other head. Simple ATA controllers do not allow overlapping, so the capabilities of two arms would be rarely used in a workstation context (this is changing). In a server context, capacity as well as performance is needed;
If you are going to have a second set of heads, why not package them withe a second set of platters in a second enclosure and double capacity - i.e. a second drive.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
It depends on the room temp probably, or one temp sensor is inside and one is outside the case in a different spot.
In Phoenix during the summer my room got to 40 C. I'm sure that is why one of my drives is on its way towards dying.
I've since switched to using Seagate Barracudas in all my machines. They are almost completley silent, sometimes you can hear the thrashing but they make very little noise just spinning. In fact, I have never really noticed what they sound like spinning, since I'd probably have to shove my head inside my PC to hear...
Anyone else have favorite hard drives they use because of their lack of noise?
"Consider the lillies of the goddamn field."
I'd like to see some statistics on who really cares about this "silent pc" crap. I suspect none of them went to college or are all women or something.
Honestly I have 15krpm drives and the sound never bothers me. Maybe thse people got cross bread with a poodle or something.
I use the same basic idea, cept I put a large water block on top of the hd as that my 10k RPM 74 gb cheatah's get a 'little' warm.
Anybody else ever water cool a hard drive?
Welcome to the End
but he doesn't know that 45-38 = 7....
Programming is simply the application of logic to creativity
Just get a decent drive - eg the Seaget BarracudeIV/V with fluid bearings - MAxtor now make such things too. this has minimal accoustic issues.
then take that drive, and using large elastic bands, suspend it in a 5.25" enclosure . zero vibrations to the casing.
"I'll" love for you to think before you type.
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I would like to point out I wasn't trolling, and it is actually the solution I use for computer noise, with a lost of all the side effects I've expreienced.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
[root@localhost]# /usr/bin/eject /dev/hda /: device is busy /usr/bin/eject: unmount of `/dev/hda1' failed
umount:
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.