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Silencing a Hard Drive Using Household Items

Posted by kdawson on from the bread-olives-and-silence dept.

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."

3 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. i have never found hard drive noise a problem by wjh31 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  2. The catch is by Kupfernigk · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.

    --
    From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
  3. I've found a better solution a few years ago by wtarreau · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.