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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.
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).
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.
Silent drive...holy drive...
If you're drive is filled with holes... you've got a problem. Could be why the drive is silent.
#define DRM chmod 000
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.
To bad that the thermal solution of every hardisc is optimized to transfer heat to the sides. The botton wont have any contact with the aluminium because of the circuit board, thus cutting off airflow and heating the chips even further, while the top of the HD consists of a thin sheet of metal that doesnt get much heat.
It would be MUCH more useful to use some heatsink stripes like from an amp, but them on both SIDES of the drive and put it into a 5.25" bay.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
They're speed holes.
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 know someone with a 420GB RAID array... does that make them potholes?
#define DRM chmod 000
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.
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 :)
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