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Silencing a Hard Drive Using Household Items
Reader Justblair recommends his blog entry detailing how he made a hard drive silencer for a pittance. "This article demonstrates a very easy-to-make hard drive silencer that not only outperforms most commercially available devices, but is cheaper to implement as well. Requiring very little in fabrication skills, it is an ideal addition to a media PC or HTPC. It may even suit you if your head is aching after many hours of being whined at by your hard drive."
No, he put the hard drive in a big aluminium case, with those gel cooling bags surrounding the drive. Sorry, I just spoiled the whole thing. That's pretty much all it says.
He embeds them in gel and he suspends them with elastic.
Same here. Hard drive noise is a non-issue for me, despite having a dozen under my desk. Now, older hard drives had an annoying whine, but today's gear is near-silent.
Take any consumer drive from the last 2-3 years, mount it sanely, either via grommets or elastic suspension as the parent suggested, and the only time you might hear something is when it is spinning up at power-on. Once it reaches normal operating revs, that thing should be noiseless.
I just built a bunch of office machines, simple little things really. Core-2 Duo, WD 500gb drive, Antec chassis... Those cheap little things are perfectly noiseless, I shit you not. You could stick your ear right up to the hard drive and barely hear the modest clicking of the heads seeking around. In fact, the Antec 120mm fan, even at 800rpm, is easily the loudest component. Now, Antec doesn't make the quietest fans, but they're certainly in the Top 5.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Rubber bands will eventually dry out and then your HDD goes for an unexpected drop inside the case. No thanks!
The loose rubber grommets which attach my drives serve the same purpose. The screw inserts directly through, but it only has enough turns to keep the disk from falling out.
I can't remember which case it is, but it should be difficult to spot from would be myth box builders.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
I second your suggestion to use rubber grommets. Even the loudest 10k raptor drives are silenced by long screws in rubber grommets. Antec knows this, that's why they include them with almost every single one of their chassis. Chenbro uses some screws with rubber pads on them as well.
Yea but what happens when the rubber-bands break?
Someone else way down in the comments mentioned using foam pipe insulation to fit a 3.5 drive into a 5.25 bay. That's quick, cheap and easy to do, but doesn't really work nearly as well as it could. Most types of flexible plastic and rubber do very little to dampen vibration.
The better material to use here is Sorbothane. In the US, McMaster-Carr is one place that sells small pieces online/mail order. (also be warned--Sorbothane is tacky and tends to stick to any surface it's clamped against for a long time. Use pieces of paper on any side of it you don't want to stick....)
Actually, that's not completely accurate. I'm extremely hard of hearing, but the TV/transformer/HDD noise drives me absolutely batty. Many people's hearing difficulty is at significantly lower frequencies than those emitted by the whiney sources.
Yep this gel-mounting is disaster waiting to happen.
Hard drives put out a staggering amount of heat. By sealing the drive inside a blob of gel, he's effectively created a pressure cooker! Now there are some exotic drive coolers that envelop the drive in a liquid-filled sleeve, but those kits actually cool the liquid via radiators and natural convection, a huge difference!
If I see a hard drive without airflow nearby, I tense up because I know that thing's going to die prematurely. When a hard drive is running hotter than the CPU, failure is inevitable.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The speed of a drive is highly related to the noise that it makes. With 10,000 rpm and even 15,000 rpm hard drives in the wild things can get noisy.
However, ideas like suspending it with rubber bands may well have a serious flaw. We don't know to what degree physical contact with the metal in the drive bay acts as a heat transfer medium. A drive suspended in air might suffer a melt down or early death.
The story is mirrored here: Silencing a hard drive
(The pictures couldn't be salvaged from the original story.)
that's not a good idea, it probably doesn't conduct heat properly.
Some of Antec's power supplies, like the True Control II-550 have a motherboard fan power and a few dedicated 4 pin molex fan only plugs. The motherboard plug lets the power supply use the motherboard temperature readings to adjust the voltage to the attached fans.
It also comes with an optional 5-1/4 bay panel with 4 dials that let you control minimum fan voltage, vcore, and one other voltages.
I guess not exactly the same as direct motherboard control, but then you don't need like 4 chassis fan headers on the board to achieve a similar effect. If you have those 3 position Low/Med/High fans antec sells, they suggest setting it to High if using the TrueControl II to control them.
http://www.antec.com/usa/productDetails.php?lan=us&id=22552
I don't think it's that simple. A hard drive would two big sources of noise - the movement of the platters and bearings and the motor controller. The platters and bearings would probably be some sort of pink noise - a broad band with a peak that varies with the RPM. Hard drives use brushless motors, and the motor controller sends power in pulses typically in the 13kHz - 15kHz range in 3 phases, which means audible noise at the same frequency and complex harmonics all over the place.