Yes. These systems remove seek and idle noise, but usually make the largest impact on seek noise.

Yes they do, that's the whole point of them. They work by either decoupling the HDD from the case so the noise and vibrations aren't transferred into the chassis, or they enclose the drive in a noise-proofed box that keeps the sound from traveling into the case.

I´m going to study these systems.

Seems cheap and usefull...great.

I thought the main function of these systems was to attack the iddle noise, caused by the whole HD container vibrations. Hanging it avoids the vibration of the box and stops the iddle noise.
But the seek noise comes directly from the inside of the HD, I thought it was not a matter of case (I mean computer and HD cases) vibration.

My feeling when I see the photos is that If you hang the HD from somewhere, the inner vibrations will still occur. Where am I wrong?

i'm not so sure this sticky thread is the right place to answer basic questions like this. This is meant for people to share and compare developed methods. That said, the mods will be the ones to make that decision....

vector3, your questions can be answered by basic physics texts on sound and vibration. Or simple experimentation. Surely you can at least find some foam to rest a drive on and at least temporarily experiment to hear the effects for yourself. I can even do that, and I'm about as mechanically retarded as they come.

I'm not quite sure why you'd think the case would selectively augment idle noise, and not seek noise. The HD mechanism is the origin of um, any HD noise.

I agree with you about the unapropiate place to start a thread or talking basics.
So...thanks for the answers and see you in other topic.

Well, the best way to learn is to try, so I tryed.

I´ve used a piece of foam received in a postal box this christmas.
The HD lies directly over the foam.
The seek noise has been reduced to 60 - 70%......Great!.

Now, I´m a little worryed about the heat because I don´t have a termometer to monitor the HD temperature. (I´m planing to buy one)

There are two coolers just in front the HD, so I think it´s enought, but I´m not really sure.

Some photos HERE

told ya it would work.

check the weblinks for some temp monitoring utilities that will use the HD's built in sensors, I personally use DTemp periodically to make sure everything's good.

I'm wondering if decoupling (the bungee cord method) can actually decrease the whine noise of my western digital 120gb. I guess this method only reduces vibrations but not high frequency whine..?

It helps a little bit with whine, but it is most effective at removing seek noise.

Give it a shot. It only costs a couple dollars and it will yield some improvement, just don't expect a night and day difference, for that particular drive.

ATM I'm planning to get an Antec SLK3700AMB and it has rubber grommets that are listed in the "good" category.

I was wondering how much of a noise difference there'd be between these and some kind of suspension method?

Depending on your hard drive, it can be a very noticable difference, if you have a quiet system.

I used 12 cable ties to decouple my (quite noisy) ExcelStor J240. Eight of them connected into two circles around the drive (tight enough to prevent the drive from slipping out) and four more fed under the two circles and through the mounting holes for 5 1/4" drives to get it airborne. No more crunching

Gish - cableties everywhere.

First, Bluefront abuses them to hold a heatsink in place (which solved one of my dilemmas, fortunately), and now they're used for HD suspension.

Do you have pics on HOW you did it? I'm curious. .

I don't have a camera But it's really easy to figure out - you just chain 4 cable ties into one rectangle and tighten it around the HDD. You can make do with two, or even one big cable tie, but four provide natural right angle corners and maximum amount of friction. Two (or three, or more) such rectangles provide the attachment points to hold the drive airborne.

It is. It's listed at the bottom of the "best" group.

I have the same Seagates as you x2 for RAID 0. If you want a less radical approach to what is described above to reduce this seek noise, I did the very simple thing of loosening my HD screws which in turn lessons by about half the energy transfered to the case and the resulting noise generated by the hard drive for that transfered energy. The drives are tolerable now. I hope this helps!

-X

PS. If you keep those HD's screwed in tight, expect to get a good amount of noise directly transfered through the case to the outside world.

If you loosen the screws, then eventually the vibration of the drive will completely unscrew them. This, of course, could make your hard drive fall or slide around (not good.)

Are you saying that your HD makes so much vibration that it can move the screws while the HD is resting on the said screws due to vibration alone? If this is the case, I'd suggest you buy a new HD first since this is definitely not going to help you! Nor would this help any suspension system listed here since the HD would probably vibrate right out of it.

The HD's weight alone resting on the screws in my case prevent any sort of screw movement at all. I could see this being a problem if i constantly transported my case from one location to another, but my case never moves from it's current spot. But of course, this goes with any of the other suspension systems listed here too and moving the case around.

-X

PS. Just checked out your HD rack. I wish I had the room for something like that in this box.

PPS. I should also mention that I do not have the screws screwed only half way on (I should be more clear) and they are screwed against the mounting rack, just not 'tightened'. I find that when they are tightened, I get all the noise transfer.

I've been a Sys Admin/IT Director for many years.

In that time, I can't count the number of times I have opened up a computer to work on it and found some or all of the hard drive screws had loosened themselves. In some cases, this caused the hard drive to be completely free of the chassis.

In these cases, no one purposefully untightened the screws, they just worked themselves loose, over time. This will happen because of vibration and also the expansion of contraction of metal as it is heated and then cooled (what is commonly called 'chip-creep'.) I have seen the same thing happen on computers I have built, over the years. I had tightened the screws, but some of them worked themselves loose, over time.

I know it sounds far-fetched, but it really happens.

This is why I do not recommend partially tightening hard drive screws. In my opinion, if you are going to use hard drive screws, then you need to tighten them well and use locking screws (the ones with ridges that help keep the screws from unscrewing.)

Of course, from a Silent PC persective, you really can't beat some kind of mechanical decoupling, such as the various suspension techniques or sorbothane.

My contribution:

Put 3.5" hard drives in a 5.5" cardboard box with cardboard spacers at sides and end & in between, kitchen no-slip material between/under/on top of them to dampen sound and keep drives from slipping out of box (which is open at one end.)

Kind of like packing them for shipment - but with the "business end" exposed so you can plug in your cables.

OK, heat problem?

Not really. Air can make a circuit around them, due to the way the spacers are put together at the sides and end. I have a 10CFM "slot blower" undervolted to 7v, it is inaudible. I stuck that in one side of the open end of the box. 5CFM or so is plenty for my 2 drives.

Stick the box in the 5.25" bays and you are done. You have cool and inaudible drives - cardboard and rubberized no-slip material are terrible sound conductors!

Once in a while when the Maxtor feels the need to re-organize the internet cache or something, I get a little thrumming.

I did this to kill the annoying whine from the Maxtor. Which it does. Overall, the whine is gone (95%), the seek noise is gone (95%) and the drives are cooler than before - lukewarm to the touch.

As a small added bonus, with the HDDs in the 5.25 bays, more cables are out of the way of the airflow, and I can devote the bottom front of the case to a 120mm fan (@7v)

the wesson

So you ought to put "boxing up your drives" on the list, near the top, it being quite good for vibration, good for the whine, offers a cooling solution, and - even - protects the HDDs from physical damage.









These are slightly old pictures. I am not proud of the looks but the concept has worked out very well for me. The only downside that I can see is that it uses two 5.25" slots. So in a mini tower like mine you can have only two CDROM/DVD drives after that.

the wesson

Same. Currently an IS manager of a smaller 25 user network, and have been building systems since CP/M days, including about 4 years in PC repair around 1990, and I have yet to find (that I recall at least) one in the condition you mention, and I have seen hundreds if not thousands. The only difference I can think is climate since we don't get the really hot hot days in the PNW that may be found elsewhere.

-X

PS. Just to make sure this isn't a problem in my case, I just did a double check on my HD's and the screws are still in the same postion as where I left them, and this PC has been cycled many times since. Vibration on these (2x Seagate 7200.7 120 GB SATA) drives of course is non existant which may explain it. I could see where this possibly could be a problem on one of my older drives that sounds like a jet is taking off when at idle! And to think we tolerated this noise for years for the sake of speed? Sad.

PPS. I wish I had the room for a mounting system, but I just don't. I have a couple other systems at home here that I might be able to squeeze something in, but you probably know how it goes - This one gets all the good stuff and the other systems are always made out of left over parts! And they aren't as useful or used as much, other than in a server type capacity or experimentation.

Just to let you know, might be useful for someone.
II ordered an 1/8e sorbothane sheet from McMaster (could find any retailer in Europe, even asked Sorbothane UK but they couldn't help me).
the sheet costs about 4 €, and shipping was about 15 € more (total 20 €).
anyway can't wait to install my hdd on it

before i suspended my hard drives, i simplly isolated them from the case with felt and kept em in the 3.5" bay. I used felt grommets on the screws as well, it worked well, but suspension is better.

And the felt costs 35p a sheet, enough to do loads of drives. Helps isolate fan vibration too.

griff

i previously had my hard disks suspended in the 5 1/4 bays - a copy of mikec's copy of novibes...i.e.

and

but i have become unhappy with this setup because the drives run quite hot (~46C) and it is too hard to remove/swap drives (i swap drives a lot and take them to friend's place etc, also i would like to remove them quickly because i don't like suspended drives wobbling about when i'm transporting the case anywhere). i was trying to think of a new way to suspend the drives, this is what i wanted:

1) easily/quickly removable
2) equal or better acoustic decouple than previously
3) keep drives a little cooler than before without necessitating addition of another fan to the system
4) free

there are currently only 2 fans in my system, a 92mm evercool on zalman AlCu and 120mm yate loon in the super tornado. i didn't feel like buying heatsinks or heatpipes [see 4)] so the only way i could see to cool these things a bit more was to use some of the existing airflow. i figured it would be impossible to use any of the airflow around the 7000 since he's so good at gobbling up all thats available. but the yate loon sucks up a fair amount of air and it wasn't doing much good sitting directly on top of the cpu there either (competing for air less than a cm away from the 7000's fins). so what i did is move the PSU into the 5 1/4 bays, and suspend my HDs underneath. they needed to be suspended vertically because there are 3 1/2 bays at the spot i was aiming for. this is what i came up with:

the first thing is a standoff (one of those things which floats motherboard above case side). the second thing is..err..some picture hook or something maybe, i don't know really i just found some of these in the garage
the standoff has US thread and can screw it into the HD side like so..

then i just strung up a sort of elastic clothesline inside the case which i can hook as many of these on as i please (space permitting).

pros: 'washing line' idea looks kind of silly and cute. temps are WAY improved (-10 C) with the new position: i left one drive in the top 5 1/4 bay, mike style, so i could compare directly to the two sitting under the yate loon (46 compare to 37 and 36 C). psu now does not have to intake the much hotter air from cpu area.

cons: takes a bit of fiddling the tensions in the elastic to get the drive to sit at a right angle. it's also kind of crap the way the drives can swing side to side if you bump the case, although i don't think it would be hard to fix this degree of freedom somehow..couldn't be bothered right now

If I'm not mistaken, I haven't seen anyone try this idea. I detached the HDD bay (no floppies here, thanks!) and sat it on a block of foam rubber in the bottom of my case. I drilled two holes in the bottom of the case and threaded some bell wire through to hold everything in place. I've got an AOpen microATX case which has an easily detachable drive bay (note the silver-coloured push tab on the top of the bay) which made life a little easier.

I used bell wire to hold things down because its stiffness allows me to twist/untwist it if I need to get at anything. Don't be tempted to pull it down tight though! It's amazing how those vibes start sneaking back! It's not necessary anyway, as there isn't much allowable movement. There's no need to worry about doing anything before transporting the unit, and airflow around the drive is maintained. I'm sure this idea can be tweaked a bit, however it was easy to do and cost me virtually nothing.

looks like it's still hard mounted into the 3 1/2 bay. doesn't this mean there is still some of the noise amplification effects happening?
i'd like to try myself to see whether i can hear a difference between this and the drive on its own, but i don't know how to get the 3 1/2 thing detached from the case... you got a nice little clip there but mine appears to be pop-riveted on or something

Yes, the drive is definitely screwed in tight, however, there is no resonation coming from the bay, and the bay itself is almost completely isolated from the case, which I think is the important factor.

You might need to either drill out your rivets, or if you want to leave the bay where it is and you have enough space, get a bay out of an old trashed case and start playing...