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!"

Comments

Commercial Silend drive enclosure

[dgerman]

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.

Working aluminum

[The FooMiester]

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.

Still necessary?

[iamhassi]

The overclockers.com article was dated 2001, who knows how long before that the actual enclosure was built, but it seems to me that modern drives aren't as loud as they use to be.

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.

Gap filler

[Dr. Mu]

From the article:

"There are significant air gaps between the HD and the metal plates on both sides of the HD. I did not consider using thermal compound - the gaps are too big."

That's why Bergquist makes their Gap Pad product. I've used it in other applications, and it works. Plus, its cushy resiliency should knock another dB or two off the sound level.

Computer Silence

[rMortyH]

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