I haven't, but I think it would be easy to do and worthwhile, if you have one. You could soft mount a 2.5" drive in the tray, maybe by wedging it in place with foam blocks or something, and it would be dead quiet. You might even be able to suspend it with elastic, although I haven't looked at this.

done that .... works perfect but I Dumped the whole thing for a samsung spinpoint disk @ 5400 rpm .. 160 gb ... on a modded xbox you realy cant have enough diskspace

True, and I would probably have done the same myself by now but I keep all my movies and music on my main PC and stream them with XBMC. So I haven't needed to upgrade the stock 10Gb drive.

How quiet is the Spinpoint compared to the stock Seagate?

Hi from Stockholm

I need some help/advice.

A friend at work got me hooked up with a new XBox XBMC with
250 GB HD. But it's so noisy...my wife adamantly refuses
to use it when she's in the room so I've been scouring the net
for help with what to do.

First off, if I get a 80 mm fan do with 3 pin, do I need a 4pin/3 pin
converter thingy or will it connect directly?

Also the XBMC doesn't seem to show me the current CPU/GPU temps.
All there is is the Temp Control and Fan Control.
Was this in previous versions of the XBMC ? or how can I access it ?

Thanks for all help.

Hi Irish, and welcome to the forums.

You don't need a 3 or 4 pin fan - I've used a 2 pin on in mine (a quiet 80mm Panaflo) and it works perfectly. Just make sure you plug it in correctly if the fan connector is slightly different. And bear in mind you'll have to do some cutting of the fan and case to get it to fit properly. Choose a quiet fan as recommended here and you should notice a big difference.

XBMC does report CPU and GPU temps, if you go to the Information page I think (can't remember off hand). But you don't really need to know them. I just set mine to fix the fan control at 40% and it never gets too hot when watching movies. But make sure it's well ventilated so gets plenty of air flow.

And before you do any of the above, check how loud your hard drive is. Since it's a replacement one you might find it contributes quite a lot to the overall noise (although the stock one is fairly quiet). Set the fan speed to 0% for a couple of minutes for a listen. If it's still noisy then it won't be easy to quieten.

But do the fan swap and you will definitely notice a difference.

Thanks Pangit...

Yes I got the saw and the fan (Papst 80mm 12db 33m3) should
do the trick

I think I saw somewhere that you cut one of the three wires and
tape the exposed bit to the case. Then plug the remaining connector
to the motherboard.

I searched on the net about how to get XBMC to show current temps
(the engineer in me would like to see exactly the before and after)
and I get the impression that previous versions of XBMC showed
it but that the latest doesn't... or maybe I can install a new dash that
shows it (not sure how to do this)

thanks again.

Now the real challenge would be to silence an XBox 360. It is absolutely the loudest thing in my condo. Especially with the DVD drive spinning for standard games.

-Ed