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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!"
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.
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.
The hole in the top of the hard drive (used to balance pressure?) would be covered. Which is not cool.
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
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.
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 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
IAAArcher, and whiskers (and puffers and all those other things) are great for reducing string vibration and noise for one reason - those strings don't weigh a hell of a lot. Additionally, you put the whiskers at the upper and lower peaks (the ends of the string are nodes, as is the middle, where the arrow nocks) and it damps them with mass.
However, hard drives weigh a hell of a lot more than bow strings.
Oh, and as for dropping your hard drive a decibel or two - IAAAudio Engineer, too, and differences of less than three decibels take good ears and a good listening environment. A decibel is barely noticeable. The article is also wrong on this point - he says that a 10 dB difference sounds to human ears like a doubling of the level. That's just wrong. Human hearing is logarhythmic, which is why the decibel scale makes so much sense. 80 dB sounds like double 40 dB.
-T
OR - just get one of the newer Seagate Barracuda ATA drives (like the ATA IV, ATA V, 7200.7, etc) these are all very quiet 3.5" drives - about the lowest acoustics you can find at 24dB (2.4 bels)