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1 2 NextJanuary 22, 2003 by Mike Chin
This DIY article describes two HDD quieting techniques:
1) HDD Rubber Box created by Leo Quan for his Quiet Dual-CPU Workstation. Extreme quieting for noisy hard drives;
2) Decouple Mounting with Carved Foam where elastic suspensions are not appropriate, ideal for silencing quieter hard drives.
1. Soundproof HDD Rubber Box
Leo's challenge was to silence two Maxtor D740X Hard Drives, a 1-platter 40 GB model and a 2-platter 80 GB. Although these Maxtors are available with Fluid Dynamic Bearing motors, like the very quiet Seagate Barracuda IV drives, Leo's were both all-bearing models. Maxtor provides a general noise spec of 3.0 Bels in idle and 3.5 Bels in seek. (But one-platter drives are usually quieter than 2-platter drives.) These numbers don't seem bad, but they are nearly 1.0 Bels worse than the Barracuda IV's, and their basic qualities includes a nasty dollop of that nasty whine so prevalent with 7200 RPM drives. In short, they are very noisy drives, typical of the highest performance models.
The reference level for the two Maxtor drives mounted normally in 3.5" drive bays in the front of the PC case was measured with an old analog Radio Shack sound level meter to be 70 dBA. The position of the recording microphone was between the two drives, within 1/2" of either drive. The maximum temperature of the 40G drive was 38C; that for the 80G drive was 34C. The drive temperatures were obtained using the S.M.A.R.T. based utility called http://www.silentpcreview.com
