Just want to add my thanks to Mike and all of the guys who posted pics in this thread and inspired me to give it try. It works great. The hardrive is very stable, cool (35c under max load), and no vibration in the case at all.

Mine is a derivative of Romeo's design further up this thread. Just some bungee cord, plastic cable clips and two machine bolts. Must have cost all of $1.50...

Hi there,

After a long lurking... my first post here.

This can be built in other case, even if you've got to drill other holes after the removal of your's built-in 3.5" HDD rack but this was first built in my brand new Coolermaster CM-690.

With wich it took me a couple of weeks of daily use to make my mind up about the original drives mounting system:

- drives are still noisy, read/write rattle mostly, even if the soft grommets do their duty quite well, but not enough to me.
- temperatures are too high: 40/45°C (104/113°F) for my system disk with 16°C (60°F) ambiant with a 6 V Nexus blowing on the drives racks.

We have to admit that this is not the best way to cool drives :

So, I built this :

(clic on the pictures to zoom in)

The drive temperatures decreased by 10°C and the remaining noise is the motor's high-pitched noise wich I'll later deaden with case isolation (thermal isolator or gym groundsheet...).

What I needed here: (proportions for 5 drives)

4x M3 threaded rods L=210 mm / 8.25" (length may vary w. other case built)
20x nuts and 20x washers
10x 10 mm/0.4" transfers sections of motorcycle tire inner tube
20x linings/sleeves (tube Ø > M3 rod, watercooling tubes offcuts)
20x 2 mm zip ties

All this cost about 1 € (1 m/3 ft threaded rod and the bunch of nuts and washers), others are used/recycled pieces.

The main goal too, after trying many variants of such build (rubber "pilars" and such) is to ease set up of the distance each drive to the other with the bolts and have all of them horizontal.
Using some tubing (here WC tubes offcuts) as sleeves makes it even easier (the frictional resistance of rubber made it hard on other systems I used).
The other major good point of this is I can swap or remove each drive as needed without messing up the others in a snap (I'm lazy and not very patient, every thing has to be easy...).

I've posted complete howtos in french on PC Silencieux and in something that should be english on my own page.

EDIT July 2008: the case was changed for a Lancool K7 that received the same mod. Some disks have been removed (to be used in a IcyBox rack only when necessary).

Silly question but what are those white plastic thingy's many of you guys have screwed to your hard drives called?
I'd love to buy some but really would rather avoid having to try and describe them to a salesperson. I'd also love to know their name in England assuming they go by something different elsewhere.

Hi Quickblood,

Someone gave the name earlier in this topic.

These are electric cable clips you'll probably find in the electric furnitures from your local hardware store.

Yeah that's what worried me. Electric cable clips look like this here



doesn't quite look like the same thing I've seen on some of these hard drives.

It was there, a few pages upward.

Anyway, the one you found, if there's nothing else, can be used with a little modding, make the hole bigger... Système D.

mcmaster.com calls them "nylon loop straps" on page 1473 (Find "page 1473"). mouser.com calls them "nylon cable clamps" (page 977, figure I). Also made from other materials, but nylon is most common.

Thankfully after a lot of searching I finally found that they're called P-Clips here.

Really needed to find that name as there is a huge variety of cable clips out there so 'cable clips' alone really wouldn't help, plus modding the ones I've found wasn't really a realistic option.

Anyway now my only problem is figuring the right size to buy.

Thanks guys.

I bought a pack from Maplin.

Thanks guys - you've been an inspiration.

I've suspended a laptop HD in a 3.5" bay. Super-easy - run a length of elastic (Fabricland, $1.33/m) through the bay screw holes and tie the two ends together (seal with hot glue). Twist once, and insert the drive. Voila:

(see next post for image)

Cost: $.50 in elastic. I still have 1.9m left!

Scott

Thanks to this thread, I have completely silenced my HTPC. I went with 1mm Stretch Magic and absolutely love the result. This stuff isn't as easy to tie into a knot as advertised though.

NSK-2480:





I went from a Seagate 7200.7 80GB (3.5") to a Seagate Scorpio 160GB (2.5") when I decided to suspend the drive and I litterally cannot hear the drive at all unless I put my ear within a coulpe inches of the drive. To my amazement, my HDD performance actually went up with the 2.5", 5,400 RPM HDD.

here is a pic of my suspension drive. there's nothing more simple than this one!

Simple sucks...the more complicated, the better!!

This is how my gaming machine is setup now (minus the ugly green foam).



I used cable clips and the HDD screws that came with the SLK3000B to hold the bungees.



I had to reinforce the FDD bay with a couple twist ties (up to the cross bar) as the tension from the bungees was pulling it down and screwing everything up.

I set up HD suspension with cheap flat sewing rubber (10m for 2 euros). The Sharkoon Rebel9 only has 5.25 bays so its perfect for this.

I used the rubber to secure the drive in all three axes, with 4 strings carrying the weight. Testing with a failed drive:



Result: HD stays in place even when the case is places upside down
Note that I placed some duck tape on the sharp edges of the case to avoid them cutting the rubber over time.

After installing the real drives:



... and there's still place for a fourth drive.

I'm very happy with the results

After all the high praise for Stretch Magic around here, I went out and bought some. But now I'm not so sure.

Stretch Magic seems to me to be a little "twangy" (think elastic band twang). Perhaps it's the size I got. I ended up with the 1.5mm variety. Since a portion of hard drive noise is high frequency, I can't help but wonder if it would transmit along the more taught piece of SM (the part carrying most of the drive weight), and get picked up by the drive cage. Also, in my setup, there are fans mounted in front of the cage, and I can imagine SM singing in the breeze. There is probably not enough air moving to do that, but it did cross my mind.

I've also been thinking about fabric store elastic. Conceptually, elastic made for clothing isn't made to be under constant stress. For example, you might wear a piece of clothing 16 hrs a day maybe two days a week. The elastic would remain in its relaxed state 80% of the time.

I'm leaning towards medium duty shock cord (ie not the thinnest - next gauge up). Thats the stuff you'll see in most newer tent poles. It's made to be under stress all the time, is a smaller diameter than Bungee thus more easily strung and knotted. In the tent pole example, they stay disassembled 99.9% of the time, thus leaving them under tension. Even when the pole is assembled, the shock cord is still under stess, just less than when the pole sections are separated. And the stuff in my tent poles has stayed stretchy for years. While it too can twang, it's a much lower tone than SM, and I think it would require hurricane force winds to make it sing in the breeze.

Maybe it is a matter of semantics. Perhaps the fabric store elastic Mike suggests, in reality has exact same material specifications as shock cord, and merely dual marketed.

Are my thought processes out of whack, or do they make logical sense?

Not whacky, reasonable thoughts.

No comments on stretch magic, never used it.

Clothing elastic -- I've used miles.

Going back to the very first elastic suspension I wrote about in 2002, I examined it about a year ago and found that much of the stretchiness had gone, some of the elastic strands were actually broken, and my HDDs were hanging mostly because the external woven fabric kept it all together. That woven fabirc is tough, as I'vge written many times before. The vibration isolation was still not bad, though. 5 years and still more or less working seems a pretty good lifespan for a buck's worth of material.

In thinking about how to avoid wear and tear on the elastic, I've come to the same point of view as you, chapmani: Keep the tension on the material to a minimum. These days, use more loops that I used to (3 instead of 2) and keep them under as little tension as possible. Then when the HDD is inserted, there is a bit more sag than before, but as I don't move the computers around much, this is no big deal. It probably gives slightly better vibration isolation, tho that was never an issue even with the material stretched much tighter.

my old elastic suspension lost elasticity in a matter of months. it was just held up by the cloth, it still worked for noise reduction but the drives were loose and in danger of falling out if you bumped the case too much
i guess its a combination of the constant strain and heating

i now no longer use elastic suspension. instead i have a lone 80GB 2.5" samsung drive sitting on a soft bed of foam, and 1TB mass storage on a NAS in the roof

I'm a Rebel9 user as well. I'm pretty annoyed by the HDD noise escaping through the mesh-front, how about you?

I sewed my elastic (the underwear type) into a circle with floss tape (works wonderful to re-attach buttons as well, they'll never come off again) and attached the ring to the cage with zip-ties. As long as the fabric part of the underwear elastic lasts, there is no way that the drive is going to fall out.

Scythe Quiet Drives each containing a Samsung 1 TB HDD. Suspended on Stretch Magic, with a block of foam between so that they do not slide down towards each other. Velcro on the top and bottom to hold it in place.

Ooooops, I did it again!

It's on a Lancool K7 for its hard-drives decoupling if quite efficient is not enough to my ears tastes.

For more building details, see there.

Canadians can get their Stretch Magic from http://www.michaels.com I think I paid 4.29 plus tax for my 4m/13'
of 1.5mm thickness. It comes in .5mm .7mm .8mm 1.0mm 1.5mm and 1.8mm. I'll post pictures when I've figured out how I'm going to do it.

I guess i may as well add mine:

http://www.image-load.eu/out.php/i74061_Picture009.jpg

Mod edit: Took [img] tags out of pic because it is so oversize. Somewhere's around here there's a sticky that asks poster to keep pic size at 800pix wide, max

have 3 more hard drives in the bottom hd cage..... and a couple externals. 4.5TiB in all, stuff takes up a lot of space.

1600x1200

Well, it is for 4.5 TB of storage

The friendly sentiment is that you might want to cut that picture down a bit...

Machine I'm building, an LC17 case sporting a C2D 2.4. All fans have been replaced with Arctic Cooling "8PWM" units.



and the two drives in the new suspension rig I put together today:



I still have to do some cable management and replace the stock GeForce fan which could conceivably be mistaken for a small corporate jet. When I halt the fan on the GeForce the machine is now pretty quiet. Could be quieter, but it's a start!

looks good. i have a feeling that the Max Orb is the cause of a lot of the other noise. The Noctua top-down cooler is good.

As for the gpu, consider an accelero S2 and open up the pci slots to let it cool off passively.

Nothing crazy, just a WD6400AAKS in my Solo. Did I do it right?

My NSK-3480 with 1 Scorpio 160GB HDD in the upper chamber.

Meant to post these a while back at same time as my build. Click for bigger.

Thanks to abirdie4me for the inspiration