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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!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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