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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!
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.
The story is mirrored here: Silencing a hard drive
(The pictures couldn't be salvaged from the original story.)
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