I've just discovered what seems to me to be a really good way to mount NoiseMagic NoVibes 2.5" HDD suspension racks in the lower HDD chamber of a P180.
These are racks which allow you to put a 2.5" (laptop) drive in a place where a 3.5" drive is designed to go. It's the little brother of the 3.5"/5.25" version which SPCR reviewed.
I got frustrated waiting for all the parts of my system to arrive, so I've starting fiddling around with my P180 already. When the 2.5" drives arrived, I thought I'd stick them into the NoVibes racks, and find a way of installing the racks inside the lower HDD chamber.
Putting the hard drives into the NoVibes racks was easy enough (click to enlarge the pictures):
Then I had the following screws and gromets, and had to attach the racks inside the disk cage:
The gromets come already inserted into their homes inside the disk cages, I've just taken then out to show their shape more clearly.
I believe that Antec's intention is that we use those long weird-looking screws that came with the P180, through the gromets, into the disk drives (or disk drive racks). But there's a better way, using those smaller screws (which came with the NoVibes kits):
Notice that the width of the racks is a fair bit smaller than the height of the disk cage, but not if you add on the width of the gromets. With the top gromets turned around, so that the thick side is inmost (down), the NoVibes racks exactly squidge into the available space.
Of course, at this stage, there's only friction holding the drives in place (and not much friction, at that). If you were to shake the disk cage at this stage, the drives would fall out of place. But as luck would have it, if you screw those small screws into the screwholes in the racks, through the gromets, then the width of the rack plus the screws sticking out on either side is just a few millimetres more than the height of the cage. Just enough, to make the drives secure.
In this next picture, I've tried to show how you can line up the drives so that you can see the screwholes in the racks, through the holes in the gromets:
The good bit about this, is that there is absolutely no contact between the screws and the disk cage, and (in comparison to using the Antec long screws) the gromets aren't even under pressure, so there's even less of a route for vibration to travel through to the cage.
You'll want to make sure that you don't screw the screws in too far (or else you risk the drives not being secure). A good way to do this is to put your finger underneath the screwhole in the rack as you are screwing the screw in, so that you can feel when the screw just pokes all the way through:
(I hope you're impressed with how I managed to take that picture, by the way!)
And here's the er "finished" article:
As you can see, I'm still missing one rather key component, so I'm not able to tell you temperatures and noise levels just yet.
I'm not, however, expecting to hear the drives!
But does the NoVibes really work as effectively when used vertically? The forces placed upon the rubber loops, would appear to be significantly different from when using it horizontally – although I can’t judge that for sure, because I’ve never physically examined a NoVibes.