I have a bit of a noise problem with my hard drives. I have four of them and soft mounting them with elastic did not make much of an improvement, so I am guessing that most of the noise is not from vibration.

Most of the noise from the drives is in the mid-tone range, but there is a slow high-pitched pulsing that is very annoying.

Does anyone know of a good internal HD enclosure? All the enclosures reviewed on SPCR seem to be external (unless I missed something). Would they even work with this many drives?

Would I be better off just upgrading to quieter drives?


System specs:

Hard drives:
WD1200JB (ATA 120 GB)
WD1600JD (SATA 160 GB)
WD1600JS (SATA 160 GB)
WD400BB (ATA 40 GB)

Case: Cooler Master Stacker 830

PSU: PC Power and Cooling Silencer 470

Motherboard: MSI Neo4 Platinum

CPU: Athlon 64 3000+ with stock HSF (next project...)

Video card: Gainward 6600GT with Zalman VF700-Cu

Have a look at nici's enclosure roundup.

It would be incredibly inpractical to enclose four hard drives, especially if the smallest of them is 40 GB. In addition, older WD drives are often loud. I think you would get a major reduction in noise by replacing the drives with two Samsungs 250 GB or 300 GB (300s are new generation, and are a bit quieter, but will cost you more...). You might want to suspend or otherwise decouple the drives to eliminate potential rhytmic beat between the two drives.

I have four of them

LOL...

Yes, see Recommended hard drives.

Actually, you could replace all your drives with one WD5000KS and eliminate the possibility of pulsing altogether.

Thanks for the help. Looking at the prices of those enclosures, getting that 500GB WD might be cheaper... I could ditch the 40 and 120 and RAID the 160s...no more ribbon cables either...

In the same vain, one of the reasons that suspending the drives did not do much might have been because the Stacker 830 already has a sort-of drive suspension built into the HD cage. Do you think that this would be sufficient to dampen the vibrations from some newer drives, or would full elastic suspension be that much better? I ask because without the drive cage, there is no place to put a fan in the front of the case...

Some pictures or the drive cage (from barrys-rigs-n-reviews.com)

Picture 1
Picture 2
Picture 3

Well, i just placed an order on NewEgg for a WD5000KS. I will let you know what happens.

Oh, NewEgg also had a Ninja Rev. B (SCNJ-1100P) on sale, so I picked up one of these as well. I also got a KAMA BAY (SCKB-1000BK) to hold a fan, as I will not be using the drive cage any more (it normally holds the front fan).