SPCR

I've read many a review about Scythe's Quiet Drive and never was a bad thing mentioned. That makes me wonder. I have two of these, both home to Samsung HDDs (400 GB IDE and 500 GB SATA). And while they both do a commendable job masking seeks and spinning sounds, they both act like giant vibration boosters. I've had them housed in 3 different cases and whenever I mounted them as intended, it resulted in a nice buzzing noise at what I can only guess were 60+ dB.

Since I've never read that in any review I'm wondering if either reviewers are stupid, bribed or lazy (not installing the box in an actual case) or if it's me who's stupid.

Anyone else experience with these babies?

No experience with them, but I have to say that's the gut feeling I have about that kind of enclosure. With standard mounting, the hard drive is still fairly well coupled to the case, so a lot of the spindle-induced vibration will be transmitted. I'm always surprised to see this not mentioned in reviews, even to say something like: "I thought this might happen but I'm pleased that it doesn't".

I've seen quite a lot of system pics where people have enclosures like these mounted on foam/carpet etc. or used externally.

I'm happy with mine, but then it rests on a foam brick in the bottom of the chassis. I don't know about "vibration boosters" but since the enclosure does nothing to stop vibrations it should be no surprise that vibrations still can be a problem. I don't see anything strange about that.

Samsung HDDs seems to vibrate more than other drives though, as noted in the SPCR reviews.

They work very well with low vibration drives like the WD 1TB GP however when I put in my Samsung F1 1TBs I started getting frequency beating after mounting them with screws.

I've since "soft" mounted them to the bottom of my case using strips of velcro.

... if only they had made the dimensions slightly slimmer so that we could suspend them in drive bays.

I can verify from my experience that these sort of enclosures need to be uncoupled from frames.

I have 2x Grow Up Japan boxes with 74GB Raptors inside.

a. When they are placed horizontally on the plastic mounts of the P182 bottom drive box - they are quiet.

b. Mounted in one of the 5.25in bays in the upper section - they are noisy.

c. I took one of the Raptors out and mounted it vertically in the bottom drive box - quiet, but not as quiet as a.

I have a 2.5in 7200rpm Samsung in a Scythe box hard mounted in a 3.5in bay, but this does not produce high noise levels.

tim851 wrote:...I'm wondering if either reviewers are stupid, bribed or lazy (not installing the box in an actual case) or if it's me who's stupid....

It depends on where you look for reviews. A great many of the hardware review sites on the internet are, in fact, run by idiots, so it doesn't surprise me that a lot of them missed that detail. This is especially true since most sites don't care at all how much noise their computers make. However, sites like this one care so much about noise that they're likely to soft-mount the drive even once it's in an enclosure, so they would also have missed your problem.

I use a 2.5" Quiet Drive on my Velociraptor, suspended, and I'm extremely pleased with it. Then again, because the drive was already suspended, I wasn't concerned with vibration - I bought the enclosure to reduce airborne noise.

They don't suck, but they can't be hardmounted. If you hardmount them in anything but a chassis made of granite they do indeed amplify vibration to an annoying degree.

tehcrazybob wrote: I use a 2.5" Quiet Drive on my Velociraptor, suspended, and I'm extremely pleased with it. Then again, because the drive was already suspended, I wasn't concerned with vibration - I bought the enclosure to reduce airborne noise.

How'd you do that? The VelociRaptor is 12.5mm tall and the 2.5" SQD only accomodates standard 9.5mm high laptop drives?

Phew! Glad to see that it's not just me.

Moogles wrote:They don't suck, but they can't be hardmounted. If you hardmount them in anything but a chassis made of granite they do indeed amplify vibration to an annoying degree.

tehcrazybob wrote: I use a 2.5" Quiet Drive on my Velociraptor, suspended, and I'm extremely pleased with it. Then again, because the drive was already suspended, I wasn't concerned with vibration - I bought the enclosure to reduce airborne noise.

How'd you do that? The VelociRaptor is 12.5mm tall and the 2.5" SQD only accomodates standard 9.5mm high laptop drives?

See thread here : viewtopic.php?t=48650&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=60.

Other people have also made the fit work on SPCR forums.

i actually find it quite good. it quieted my seagate 160gb idle whine down a whole lot. (cheaper than upgrading and then I have the quiet drive for the future).

but i had to mount it on foam. I hardmounted it, and it was annoying. But I mounted it on foam and it's great.

Need to be soft mounted without a doubt, which can be quite tricky in many cases if not even impossible. Does wonders to the idle sound but changes read and write to something thicker and not quite muted enough.

Yeah, I found too, that soft mounting the QD was a lot better.

Yeah, I found too, that soft mounting the QD was a lot better. Mine has an old 150 GB Raptor in it.

I find that hard mounting a WD6400AAKS in a SQD produces more vibration noise than when the same drive is clipped into the standard plastic/rubber mount in my Dell Dimension E521 case.

In my opinion, they need to be put on foam for any 7200RPM drive, but might be acceptable hard-mounted with 5400RPM drives. I'd go so far as to say that the noise of the WD6400AAKS in the SQD, hard mounted, is actually more annoying than just mounting it directly in the case. Subjectively, the seek and vibration appears louder but it might be because the clicking is more muffled, so you hear more of the lower frequency noise than the clicking.

I have just bought 2 Scythe Quiet drive.

How do I measure before and after temperatures on the HD´s ?

Cross wrote: How do I measure before and after temperatures on the HD´s ?

Speedfan will do it.
http://www.almico.com/sfdownload.php

thanks otter

I could not get the speedfan to read hd temp.

I have mounted my 2 WD10EADS in Scythe quiet drive, on drive rails in the 2 top 5.25 bays.

Seek noise reduced significantly, I can only hear it, when I put my ear to the PC.
General noise also reduced significantly, I can hear the 2 HD´s if i put my ear to the PC, but no noise from 0,5 - 1 m , from 0,5 - 1 m I can only hear the Corsair PSU, which is the only fan in my system.
Putting my ear to the PSU and HD´s, I will estimate HD´s are 30-40% of the noise level of Corsair VX550 PSU.

Cross wrote:I could not get the speedfan to read hd temp.

I found another one for you to try.

I've read that some RAID controllers don't pass on SMART data, but CrystalDiskInfo is free, and much simpler to set up (just run it).
http://crystalmark.info/?lang=en

If I were you, I'd skip the beta at the top of the page, even if it is a release candidate, and scroll down to version 2.7.5.

I use dtemp to monitor hdd temps. Its very small and requires no installation:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/5fx2zn (100kB, uploaded by me)