SPCR

Hello guys!

I was roaming around Home depot yesterday and ran into 'sound mufflier boards'. These are 6' x 12x boards (huge) but I did see bunch of its corners dropped on the floor so I picked those up for free. Board itself (whole thing) will cost you $6.50 if you want to purchase it. The board is made out of compressed saw dust.

Now I was walking a bit more and ran into sheets of galvanized metal. It was 50cents a sheet so I said what da heck and bought one.

I came home.

What I did was I primitively wrapped the compressed saw dust around the drive (touching the drive). taped it up, then wrapped the whole thing with galvanized metal (you can fold them with barehands). Personally, I don't think you really need that metal sheet as it was mostly for cosmetics.

Result: It COMPLETELY elimiated the whining noise from my Western Digital 1200JB (special edition) and its rotational noise. and it sounds like it effectively decoupled the drive mechanically as I can hear the head noise very bearly. Now, I can definitely hear my Zalman PSU. Heat issue seems to be okay, I ran it all night dowloading files from Kazaa and it's still running nicely.

Problem: MY DELL LCD 2000FP IS LOUD!!! I'm not kidding. It makes that high pitched whining noise. I thought it was from the drive first but I can definitely notice it coming on and off by turning the LCD switch on and off.... is this normal? Obviously it's very faint noise because I didn't notice it until now (now that everything's very quiet).

SungHyun,

So glad to hear your story! I'm curious to know exactly what material it was.
Was what you got MDF? Really smooth and really heavy? Is it tan/yellowish in colour? Does it look like this?



As for the noisy monitor, there was a discussion about quieting the coils inside. http://forums.silentpcreview.com/forums ... php?t=2195

YES! it's exactly that. thanks for the picture powergyoza.

The board will break in half very easily. What I mean by half is along the length-->you can make the whole thing half as thick, which is what I've done to fit this into my 5 1/2" bay (I got only one bay extra). If you have two extra, the thickness shouldn't be a problem.

It's compressed saw dust. And looks exactly like the picture shown above.

If you can break it in half with your bare hands its not MDF. MDF is what I made my desk PC out of. It's probably homasote board.




Homasote has been used in constuction for decades as a sound absorber. That was good thinking to use it to wrap a drive. But its also a good insulator. Have you monitored your HDD temps? How much did they go up?

I could see a way where you could wrap the drive completely in Homasote, with metal heatsinks sticking out. Sorta like that guy did with the bags of sand.

Or use one of Bladerunner's HDD waterblocks, just run the tubing in through little holes in the board.



Once again, one little post has got me thinking about a new case mod again. Damn you SungHyun7!

Hey to further answer you question, it's not smooth and heavy. In fact, it's pretty rough and very light. You can cut with a normal scissor or better yet a razor blade. It's not an MDF.

I haven't checked the drive temp yet. Since it wraps the drive (not stuck to it) I can take the drive out temporarily, and temperature wasn't too high to the touch. I can definitely touch it for prolonged time. It's lukewarm.

And yes, it is an insulator... the galvanized metal sheet covering doesn't get warm at all. In fact it stays pretty cold. So I'm guessing the drive itself doesn't produce that much heat or.. as long as it can dissipate little bit by convection, it's okay (it's not a complete seal--> I left the back end open).

SungHyun7,

Your Homasote idea is inspiring!

I can take the drive out temporarily, and temperature wasn't too high to the touch.

Does your HD support temp monitoring through DTemp?

Well, it's been whole day running it continuously and it's still lukewarm (Kazaa on--continuously uploading and downloading).

Is there any program for the hard drive to make it hotter (like prime95 for CPU)? I'll be willing to try it out before you go purchase a huge board of the material. If it works after the enduring test, I probably buy a board to make a nice looking one this time. Mine looks definitely homemade... I would like to make it look like the Smart Drive.

I would install something like HDTemp or motherboard monitor, and then defrag your hard drive. Defragging gives it a pretty good workout.

Hey Rusty, where can I get HDTemp software? My mbm5 doesn't come with the hard drive temp monitoring.

John

You can find it here:

http://private.peterlink.ru/tochinov/

Or here:

http://www.hddtemperature.com/

the freeware version is at the bottom of the page

hey I downloaded it but it says it can't find any hard drive that supports temperature monitoring in my system.... oh wells... i did defrag the drive and i did notice that it got 'hot'--> could touch it but i wouldn't if i had the choice not to.

i've had worse (it got hotter) when I had this stacked ontop of IBM 40gb with not much space in between.

Maybe what we can do is use this material in some other way with some kind of heat dissipation...

fact is, drive was running fine all this time (through all defragging, downloading, uploading, idling over 3days, etc.). Only thing that bothers me is: it's winter so it's pretty cold. that's it. but since the material i'm using is supposedly an insulator anyway so it shouldn't really matter?

I'll get the exact name of the material during the weekends or tomorrow for you guys.

well it's been more than a week with the drive in my custom sleeve.

drive works fine.

but when i touched the drive today, it was pretty hot. i couldn't hold it for more than 10sec with barehands.

so my conclusion is that this solution does work, but will make your drive bit unreliable or cause shorter lifespan... something along that line.

it does work wonderfully as far as eliminating that high pitched whine though.

You may be able to mod your sleeve to increase its cooling, without reducing its muffling.

I'd try attaching a pair of long aluminum strips to the sides of the drive, with the ends of them extending past the insulation and out into the open air of the case. The strips would act as wicks for the heat, pulling it out away from the drive into the case where it can be removed by air movement. It's surprisingly effective.

For an example of this principle in action check out BlueHat's harddrive solution:

BlueHat's HardDrive Silencer

Lol! The most foolish thing I have ever done to quiet my computer is to wrap the whole thing in a layer of that sawdust stuff. It crumbles everywhere, it looks *really* tacky, and it didn't have any noticable effect on the volume of the system.

On the other hand, I can now post things to my computer with thumbtacks, so I guess it was a little useful.

And for the record, my hard drives are sitting in a foam enclosure made from an AT power supply and the packaging material for one of the drives. Temps don't go up because the drives have a custom 5v Panaflo / sleeve to the outside of the case.

But good suspension idea.

-C