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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."
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."
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...
It's a bit like a car engine - you know what your machine is supposed to sound like. When it doesn't, then you investigate.
Unfortunately, my Xbox is apparently supposed to sound like an overloaded 747 during takeoff... (I work near a UPS hub - I can take a fresh comparison every half-hour or so during the day).
My sig sucks.
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.
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.
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.)