http://www.silentpcreview.com/article22-page1.html

Mike can you express us some macro photos of your
double u sided al. hdd edge heatsinks.

How did you solder the two seperate u shaped heatsinks.
and where is the connection points to the hdd actually?

thanks.

I have finally gotten the drives I need, but I am at a loss as to where I can find this elastic material to do the suspension trick.

I had a Seagate SATAII 500GB HD and the seek/access noises were far too loud... it is the loudest thing in my system. It's not vibrational, because even holding the drive in my hand, the noise is unacceptable. Unfortunately, Seagate disabled its AAM feature.


So I bought two WD5000KS 500GB drives and I want to suspend them... I have 3 empty 5 1/4 slots... so that should be enough.

I'm concerned about heat, but noise is a primary concern.

So - where can I get this material? I'm looking for an easily-accessible store - not some specialty store. I live in downtown Toronto, so my selection is fairly limited...

hey folks

I have placed huge aluminium heatsinks to the edges of the hdd and put a stock amd heatsink to the top.

but the temperature stayed the same and has not decreased even 1 degree.

I think there are 2 possible causes and 1 possible conclusion:

1. the hdd heat sensor is malfunctioning.
2.The lower front incase temp is 44 degrees.

1. the success of this method hugely based on airflow

Hi all

I have 2 sata laptop drives (2x momentus 5400.2 80gb) in a 3700BQE case.
I'd like to suspend them using a silicone tubing used for watercooling, cutting it if needed.

Would it work? Can I remove the intake fan (120mm stock antec fan @ approx. 6v)

I'll post pics as soon as possible.

http://img96.imageshack.us/my.php?image ... rd3qa3.jpg

http://img89.imageshack.us/my.php?image ... rd2zn1.jpg

http://img89.imageshack.us/my.php?image ... rd1ei0.jpg


Barely hear seeks on the Raptor. Doesn't grind at all. Sounds less than a reg drive on a bay.

Hate links but don't feel like going to shack again.

Hopefully nobody's tackled this yet, but I haven't come across it anywhere...

Are there any opinions on how Jedster's decoupling method for the P180 would rank on this list (described here)? It's apparently much quieter than the stock grommets alone (which makes perfect sense to me) but I wonder how much quieter... It doesn't seem like it would be quite as quiet as elastic suspension, but it's also obviously far less work. I'm curious if anyone else (besides the one person with the pictures) has tried it.

I have 2 drives in a detached suspended cage. I'd say its about the easiest way to suspend multiple drives.

eSATA allows cables up to 6'. You could have HD's at quite a distance in a sub-enclosure with foam,rear venting etc. If there's to be more than 2 drives so distanced and enclosed-the housing could get more sophisticated by adding a remote fan-very low rpm. A non-system USB-2 HD,of course can also be so removed/enclosed.

A heatsink won't make heat go away,a heatsink or heatpipes for that matter,re-locates the heat. In your car,the water moves the heat from the block to the radiator,but then the heat is removed mainly as the car's speed creates airflow-with the fan as a supplement.

In this instance-cutting a small inlet in the front floor might cool that region. It still takes thinking out what the airflow path tends to be. I tend to favor a strategy of exhaust fans only---then any hole is a passive intake and a drill or dremel can redesign the air paths. The sam works in reverse with intake fans. You can go intakes only.
Often there's plenty of exhaust fan and one major inlet-so the air goes from point A to point B and outside that path-it can stagnate. Smaller,proportional inlets let airflow patters be managed.

After reading some of the HDD vibration isolation suggestions in SPCR, I have come up with these ideas. Does anyone think these might work?

All material is available from Home Depot (or your favorite building supply store).

1. Use with 3.5" to 5.25" Drive Adapter Bracket. Isolate HDD with door weatherstripping (where the HDD would be mounted) -- filled with 100% silicone rubber sealant for 100% contact. Fasten with zip ties to drive bracket. Mount HDD in 5.25" slot. Maybe isolate HDD bracket from mounting frame with Door weatherstripping cut in half.

2. Use with drive cage. Door weatherstripping filled with 100% silicone rubber sealant place below / above (total of 4 or more) HDD. Fasten with zip ties to drive cage. Mount cage in 5.25" slot. Maybe isolate drive cage from mounting frame with Door weatherstripping cut in half.

Note: I don't know if the 100% silicone rubber sealant would melt/shrink/decompose with the temperatures inside the case. Any other recommendation?

All comments welcome. TIA.

wow, i know it's an old post, but what i want to ask is still relevant - do you need to ground the suspension? i have the zalman heat pipes and it's grounded to the case - beside being separated with rubber.
thanks,
Dan.

Does anyone use a RAM-drive for the OS, and programs, then NAS located somewhere else where the drives can be kept cool without the noise?

In my network, I have a NAS with 500 Gigs of RAID 1 storage (decent for right now..), but the RAM drive is a little bit out of my current budget, (or far out of it, since it is 0 right now)...

I bought my first house (closing Tuesday) and after I move in and get the budget all established, I am going to have storage in 19" rackmounts out of 'ear-shot', and look to move to RAM drives for the PC's.... Gonna have to upgrade the network to Gigabit too.....

Does anyone else do this?

Hi,
I find this topic very useful!
i have a problem with my case, i want to suspend my HDD as you shown but my cas is a Gigabyte Poseidon and has plastic brackets to hold the HDD.
what can i do in this situation?
thanks...

no. they are grounded through the cable, you can verify it yourself with an ohmeter

thanks.

Hi,
in the end, this is what i did:



it's elastic strings like the ones in trainers shorts.

thing is, it's not very durable. and it is starting to loosen.
what other material i can use?

thanks a lot,
Dan.

I know you're not supposed to move the PC when a drive is suspended, but is just a little movement okay? I'm about to build a new computer with a suspended drive, and the computer will go with its door side facing a wall. Because of that, I can't really get to the drive once the computer is in its place.

I will be setting everything up on a table a few feet away, so would it be okay to just carefully move the computer over with the drive inside? I understand you're not supposed to move it with a suspended HDD, but it's not as if I'm lugging it around outside or not keeping it upright.

IT'S OK.
DON'T BOUNCE THE COMPUTER, OR PUT IT ON THE SIDE.

Hey everyone.

Long-time lurker, first-time poster.

OK so I've got a pretty good setup so far.

Antec P182, Corsair 620w, Ninja w/ stock fan on the Pentium D, Accelero on the 7800GT and stock P182 case fans (prolly gonna replace with Nexus Real Quiet or Noctua soon).

I have four HDDs, 2 Maxtor DiamondMax 10s:
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?v ... =TechSpecs
and 2 WD 120 giggers I got at Best Buy for some ridiculous discount.

Anyway, I am about at my wits' end with the Maxtor drives. When I built the system about two years ago they were solid performers, but back then my setup was much louder so their noise didn't bother me.

Now I can hear every seek and it kills me, especially since they are in RAID0.

I want to reduce the noise and have given a lot of thought to suspension. However, I move my PC a couple times a month (it's my LAN box too) so I'm kind of concerned about the stability issues.

Should I just buy a couple SmartDrives (expensive)? Would it be cheaper to get a couple Spinpoint Ts and set them up in RAID0 in my case (would their already-low noise combined w/ the rubber grommets of the P182 render them sufficiently silent)? Would performance be about the same as my current setup? What about the Zalman heatpipe unit?

I'm really drawn to suspension as it seems cheap and elegant. I'm pretty careful moving my gear around and wouldn't have any problems keeping the case upright (the thing certainly weighs enough) but obviously it wouldn't matter how elegant the solution if when I arrived at my destination my HDDs were damaged.

I probably ruined the sticky with all this nonsense, but I know I can't be the only one wary of suspension who shares my concerns.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Everybody makes decisions. First, you made the decision to run 4ea small (for today) HDDs in RAID. That, by itself, is a reasonable decision.

Now you want to tone down seek noise. Suspending four HDDs would do the job... if you have room to suspend 4 HDDs.

And you want to frequently transport your computer to LAN parties. This rules out many otherwise good suspension methods.
---------------------------

Unless you have a gigantic computer case - a Cosmos-alike - you're not going to be able to provide secure suspension for 4ea HDDs. (If you can do that in a normal computer case you should qualify for a nice prize somewhere! )

You can have 4ea HDDs in a normal case that you can carry around... but good luck with the seek noise. You can substitute one or two larger HDDs and achieve your quiet-seek goals with some diligent DIY on HDD suspension - but that costs money and you lose the RAID.

Perhaps someone else can provide a better (or at least cheaper) solution?

Sorry, I should have been more clear.

The WD drives aren't all that bad and are fairly quiet. So I'm looking only to suspend the Maxtors, as they are killing me.

I only really bought the WDs because they were on sale ($15 each after mail-in rebate I believe) so I could have some backup storage if the RAID array ever failed.

My case is the Antec P182:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article741-page1.html

So I have two (possibly three; my second is used by a DVD-ROM which I can lose since I already have a DVD+-RW in the top bay) free 5.25" bays right now, which I can use for suspension or buying a couple SmartDrives or some other solution.

I imagine the suspension works better as the elastic gets tighter, so that might help my drives stay in place.

So what if I suspend my drives and transport my case very carefully (upright, of course)? Should I be OK?

Hi there. I'm reading this forum and it's really good.

Hello there,


Here is my solution for removing hard disk vibrations.
This is really good because you can move your PC anywhere without worry that your hard disk will fall out or be damaged. They are well placed and can be easily removed.

You will need one bicycle inner rubber (2 euro) and two wood pencil (in my case four because I have two HD).






Hope this helps someone.


Drazen

Huh, looks pretty interesting.

So you cut up the tube into rings, poke the screws through the tube rings to secure the tube rings to the drive, then pull the tube ring through the drive area and secure a pencil to each side.

Very nice.

My only concern is that eventually, the screw hole you made might tear the rubber. How long have you had your setup like this?

It looks really nice and it makes me wonder why I haven't seen something like this before.

In any event, my finals are (finally) over, so I'm gonna crack open my case and get to work this weekend.

You don't have to worry about that. Rubber is tight precisely as it should be (believe it or not).

You can be sure that same will be in your case because width of space where DVD-ROM comes is same on all cases and width of HD is also same.

I have maid this before 8 month. It's working without any issue.

If you need any help let me know.

all

reading this sticky including the links it made make me think the next advance would be suspending links that are heat conducting, e.g. metallic Stretch Magic ... IF an inexpensive solution can be found, that is

in my Panasonic Toughbook, the 2.5"hd is very tightly covered by a metal casing (for heat I think) and then some foam like things for stability

cheers
geoff

I'm going to explore using a quiet frisbee to blow at the suspended drive maybe with metal flanks to help dissipate heat ...

http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/ ... Z-3500.jpg

Hey guys,

nice one Zicko. I might give it a try myself.

I got a Samsung HD321KJ (T series) in the mail today, and it sure vibrates a lot. A loud low frequency hum. I had also ordered a Nexus Disktwin heatsink/suspension kinda thing to go with it.

It's not a very good solution. The rubber blocks that serve to decouple the drive from the case, are much too rigid, and it took some force to get it into a 5.25 drive bay, which means the block is under pressure as well. I think it reduces vibrational hum by perhaps 40%, but it was outperformed slightly by a bed of tie wraps. Still not enough though.

I think I'll be returning it, although I could remove the rubber blocks to end up with a nice pair of heatsinks. Together with some elastic suspension it might be a good solution, although installing/removing a drive will be a menace, because you have to get the heatsinked drive past the elastics. Perhaps the bicycle-inner-tube suspension goes well with it, since the rubber rings are mounted to the harddisk rather than the cage. I'm just bit worried that bicycle tube is too rigid. I mean, it takes a lot of force to stretch it so I'm wondering if I don't end up with something that is similar to my tie wrap bed in terms of decoupling. Can you illuminate me on that, Zicko? Can you feel harddisk vibes on your case or drive cage?

I also got a Hitachi 5K160 (5400) notebook drive. I never knew notebook drives were that small! The Samsung (7200) is almost twice as fast in terms of buffered disk reads (60MB/s vs. 35MB/s). The Hitachi vibrates a lot as well, but I was thinking of just putting it on foam. It is so light that its cable connections have a big say in whether it hovers or sits, so to speak.

Ciao, xen.

I think the ranking system needs to re-look at the grommet mounts available on todays antec (and similar) cases.

the ones on the solo/p180 are a far cry from the ones that were used on the sonata/sonata2. (so much so, that for all the HDD's in my sonata 2, i replaced the grommets with spare ones from the solo)

I can tell no difference between elastic suspension and the sillicone grommets. then again my computers are audible, so i guess that puts a damper on my ability to hear stuff.

Hi Xen,


You should certainly give a try using bicycle-inner-tube.

I don't have any vibration on my case after I install my solution. Bicycle tube isn't so much stretch as you think on my case. Should be same for all other because dimension of hard disk and DVD-ROM space is same.

Spending 2 Euro and 1 hour for installation isn't so much for benefit you might have.


Zicko

Actually I still have a used inner tube lying around so it wont even cost me $2 but atm the harddisk has gone back to where it came from so I can't try it out atm. I was using some Eminent SATA controller but it was doing weird things to my system.