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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."
Does it involve bludgeoning with any number of common household items?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
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
Or you could just buy some newer hard drives out there with high ariel density. WD 640GB AAKS model & 1TB drives are practically dead silent. That or buy some SSD's. Really this noise issue is beginning to lose importance these days and that's the point I'm trying to make here.
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.)
He embeds them in gel and he suspends them with elastic.
I'm not sure that the 'cooling pads plus box' enclosure is a good idea. It looks like it will make the drive less efficient at radiating heat away. Might lead to overheating, especially in the fanless system in the article.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Whilst I could do without the constant whine of the drive spinning, I actually like that I can hear the heads doing their thing because you can use it as another way to monitor what my system is doing. If the hdd starts making lots of noise when I don't expect it to, I want to know whats going on.
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."
Now, I can image a large number of household tools to cut up a hard drive, but whether they will fulfill the criterion "outperforms most commercially available devices"?
Generally, people who can hear the high-pitched whine of a TV or the whine of transformers can also hear hard drives whine and find all the whining noise annoying. People going deaf won't know what the hell I am talking about.
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...
You mean like using a hammer?
- Life is what keeps you occupied while you are waiting to die
Since when is a "188x119x55mm Alu alloy Hammond enclosure," a common household item?
Here are some more do-it-yourself tutorials about hard disk drive silencing techniques as well as about selfmade cooling techniques. The ideas are ranging from an acoustic cabinet, switching off the HDD when not in use to cure vibration (the main cause of noise) with some rubber and others.
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.
Gun
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
Yeah, see, I was getting tired of hearing my hard drive whine, but rather than dampen the noise coming from it, I decided to drown it out: I had kids.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
So it seems that they just prohibit access to the drive.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Look like someone silenced Justblair's hard drive: the site is down...
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.
1. post story to slashdot
2. watch server burst into flames
3. apply fire extinguisher liberally
4. enjoy perfectly quietened hard drive noises
(there's no "profit" in there... I must've missed a step!)
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
The story is mirrored here: Silencing a hard drive
(The pictures couldn't be salvaged from the original story.)
Generally, people who can hear the high-pitched whine of a TV or the whine of transformers can also hear hard drives whine and find all the whining noise annoying. People going deaf won't know what the hell I am talking about.
Personally I hate it when Rodimus Prime whines. Good thing they brought back Optimus Prime to put him in his place.
I did the same thing five years ago, at the height of noisy desktops. My bedroom computer is now in my closet, with the monitor/keyboard/speakers/mouse/etc on a desk on the other side of the wall.
The only problem is that my new computer is so quiet that the whole arrangement seems silly.
...and it shall be silent forever!
Ah, so now we know what M.C. was singing about when he said "STOP! Hammertime!"