Reusable drive suspension.

[Tibors]

First I wanted to create an Aphonos' style drive suspension. But ofcourse I had to do things differently. The elastic I had was thinner than Aphonos' bungee cord, so I needed more than four strings. I also wanted the design to fit in different cases. Lastly the suspension unit should be removable, so I would be able to reuse it.



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This wooden U-bracket is what I came up with. The rest of this post is the story of its creation.



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A 3.5" drive measures ~100mm x ~150mm. I cut a piece of those dimensions out of 3.6mm thick plywood. This plywood is too thin to easilly screw eyelets into. So for the other leg of the bracket I used a 150mm long piece of 18x94mm pine board. Lastly I cut a piece of 94x40mm plywood, which would form the connection between the legs. I glued the three pieces together.



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I painted the wood with some primer. Next I drilled eight holes in the "fat" leg of the U-bracket. These are for screwing eyelets into. I'm not going to trust the safety of my hard drives to some wood glue, so I also drilled four holes for screws which would connect the three pieces of wood.



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I painted the bracket and screwed the brass plated hooks and screws into the holes. The paint is actually dark red, but the fluoresent lighting and the flash make it look pinkish on the pictures.




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I took six hooks you normaly use to suspend picture frames. I drilled a new bigger hole in the center of the attachment plate of each hook. Then I screwed them to the sides of a hard drive.



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I had some elastic from a matras cover I had cut to pieces to create headbands for costumes for an LRP event. I used this to string the bracket and the disk to each other. The result can be seen used in three different cases above. First in my old Chieftec bigtower case. Next in my Chieftec Dragon medium tower case. Lastly in one of my Antec Sonata cases. I don't like the airflow in the last case. (Who does ) So when I'm done with it, the drivecage will be gone and the drive suspended below the lower floppy position.

[ultraboy]

Very nice thinking Tibors (workmanship too ), although I must say one of the pic for Dragon case (one before last pic) looks a bit scary to me as it doesn't look very secure - may be due to camera angle.

Would this wooden U-Bracket rattle when you move to other case since case thickness may be different. Anyway this is not too difficult to fix.

[Tibors]

There is about 7cm of metal between the legs of the bracket in the Dragon case, so that is secure enough for me.

I thought about the width of the gap between the legs of the bracket. It is easy to fill in the extra space if needed. But almost impossible to increase the width once constructed.

[Markp.com]

Will the wood not act as a massive amplifier for the drive noise?
Vibrating up the elastic like guitar strings.

[Tibors]

The physical properties of that elastic are completely different from those of guitar strings. Because the weight of the HD is distributed over twelve strings, the strings don't come even close to being stretched taught. So they won't transmit vibrations to the wood. In contrary the elastic is what dampens the vibration.

The next quote is from the article I linked to at the top.

Drive suspension is a much-discussed technique to reduce hard drive noise, especially seek noise. It works very dramatically, by decoupling the hard drive from the case and thus eliminating HDD vibrations from causing case panels to vibrate and make noise.

On top of that, the wood is soft pinewood. Ever try to make a block of that resonate? The best you get is a dull "plock" sound when you hit it.

I have a simpler prototype of the construction above in my other Sonata case. I can't hear that HD (40GB Seagate 7200.7 PATA) at all over the 120mm fan in the "Fortron" PSU. I could hear the seeks before I suspended it.