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."

Comments

i have never found hard drive noise a problem

[wjh31]

the fans are the noisiest part of my computer, and always have been on any computer ive ever had. However i do occationally hear the click-click of the head moving, but never the whine of the platters, will this sort that out too?

ive seen another hard drive silencing technique elsewhere that's even cheaper, although possibly not quite as effective, which is simply to mount it with rubber bands in a 5.25" bay rather than screws.
http://www.spodesabode.com/archive/content/article/hddnoise

Re:i have never found hard drive noise a problem

[FractalZone]

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.

As someone pointed out above, it is the direct metal to metal connection from the noisy drive to the case that transfers most of the sound and the case often works as sort of an acoustic amplifier, much the way the horn on an old gramophone does, especially if some part of the case (usually one of the side panels) resonates at some (sub)harmonic of the frequency at which one of the drives is vibrating.

In the past, I've actually solved drive vibration noise problems by the simple expedient of taking a 3.5" HD and wrapping it in enough plush carpet remnants to that it will fit snugly into a 5.25" drive bay. This will also muffle the whine of spinning disks and moving heads to some extent -- usually a lot, in my experience.

If you look at many (most?) hard drives you will see a little hole with what looks like a filter of some sort beneath it. It is there for a reason, namely pressure changes due to weather or relocation of the drive from one altitude to another. When attempting to stifle hard drive noise, you do not want to seal this venturi by covering it with tape or a gel pack attached tighly enough to prevent the drive from "breathing"; a horrible analogy, I know, but the only better one I can think of is that the drive uses that heavily filtered venturi to equalize its internal air pressure to that of its environment much the way your ears pop (especially if you yawn) when the pressure in an airplane, tram, cable car, elevator, etc. changes significantly as you move up or down.

Cooling fans, especially if you use a lot of them instead of more esoteric means of preventing CPUs, GPUs, and high-performance HDs from overheating, tend to make a lot of noise. Most stock cooling fans are really cheap and don't have terribly great bearings or advanced blade designs. It is often worth it to pay more for high end fans which are designed to move air efficiently (which implies more silently, if you think about it -- the energy wasted making a lot of noise is wasted energy). Blowing the dust off the fan blades every few months will make the fans quieter, too.

Mr. Wizard (not an acoustic engineer, but can fake it :-)

Super-Heated

[Chris Rhodes]

He's lucky his drive lasted that long. I've yet to see a maxtor or a seagate inside of one of their enclosures last that long. Having taken them apart, I saw that the seagate one was completely covered, multiple times, with no airflow.

Those things get way too hot. My mom has a new hard drive (as of this summer) with three directories of files recovered from signatures. Nasty.

Drives should be covered with moving air. They should also be mounted to the ground plane (which is the PC case.)

The catch is

[Kupfernigk]

Hard drives are designed for air cooling, not conduction. That's why those little circuit boards are exposed on the outside of the drive. (Conduction cooled circuit boards do exist, especially in military systems, where expensive machined conduction plates are bonded to the upper surface, but you won't find those in commercial electronics.) Putting a gel pack on the circuit board may cool some components adequately while leaving others uncooled.

There is a reason why Apple uses (used to use) FEA programs to design the cooling systems of their computers, and it is not marketing. In the good old days, you often found bad engineering practices in cheap PCs - such as the hard drive being screwed wrong side down to the chassis - and it was then not unusual for them to work OK as a desktop but fail quickly if used as a server, because the HDD was now actually doing some work.

cat hair

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got about 6 years worth of cat hair coating my hard drive and it's very quiet now... also heats my feet during the winter... you get used the smell after the first year...

I've found a better solution a few years ago

[wtarreau]

I simply cut some pipe insulation foam in halves, and rolled both parts around the disk, one near the front side, one near the rear side. I used some electric wire around the foam to hold it in place. Now my 3"5 disk fits perfectly in a 5"25 slot in front of the case's fan, and the foam's thickness prevents it from moving. I can't hear it *at all* now, eventhough it's a SCSI 15k rpm, because the noise from the motor normally conducts through the metal and the fixations only.

It requires very little material, skills and time to do this, and the disk can be
extracted at any moment without hassle.

Re:Maybe it's just me...

[Curtman]

My old roommate had a television that emitted a horrendous (to me anyway) screaching sound which he had never noticed before somehow. He claims now that I've pointed it out to him it's unbearable to him too, so he gave the TV to his sister, and nobody in her family knows about it. I'm very curious if they can be "trained" to hear it as well.

Re:RTA, he does suspend them.

[billcopc]

Actually you can have a silent PC with silent fans. The standard is 20dB at one metre (3 ft). Those 3 feet are what enable a quiet PC to become a silent PC.

Turn just about any good fan down to 800rpm or less, and it becomes nearly inaudible in free air. Once you combine such a quiet fan with the PC's chassis resonance (on a good chassis), the chassis' acoustic properties will effectively shape the noise (like a bandpass speaker box). Some of that noise gets muffled internally, some of it gets dispersed at the vents, and ideally very little sound will reach your ears.

Making a quiet PC is easy, because off-the-shelf components have gotten very quiet over the years. Making a silent PC is more like building an awesome loudspeaker - there's a lot of planning, acoustic measurements and math involved to meet your sonic goal.