I contacted a few retailers and wholesalers around the world, quietpc was one of them iirc.
NeilBlanchard wrote:
Is this product available in the US? If so, what is the street price?
Hopefully they will be in a short time. Endpcnoise already received the pricelist. Pugetsystems were looking for something that would completely silence the drive - I am looking into possibilities here.
Regarding street price, well, without knowing the tax and duty system in the destination country/state I am not able to tell, but I can tell you the MSRP is 10EUR for the single, 21EUR for the 3pack and 25EUR for the 4pack. These include VAT. Since - If i'm not mistaken - there is no such thing as VAT in the US, the prices should be similar or a bit higher in USD. All depending on the amount bought by the wholesaler/retailer since transportation cost is quite high.
NeilBlanchard wrote:
My concern would be with the suspension material -- it looks like a foam product of some sort, and these tend to dry out and fail in relatively short order.
The suspension material is half synthetic foam rubber that should not age/dry out/loose it's elasticity - at least not as rapidly as plain rubber. As Gabo and Faugusztin mentioned before, the same material was used in the previous version and there is quite a few of them out there for 3+ years. Sure, there is a bit more rubber in the older version, but there the rubber was stressed a bit more as the whole assembly was about 1/2" - 12mm narrower than the 5.25" bay so it had to be stretched quite a bit to mount the assembly at all. I chose to lower the amount of rubber to cut costs - without harming functionality, as the rubber itself is one of the biggest numbers in the total manufacturing cost. Providing replacement rubber kits is sure a good idea though!
MikeC wrote:
If the airborne noise of the suspended drives are low, then simply replacing one or more of the CD drive bay covers with a mesh screen will automatically generate airflow, assuming you have at least one exhaust fan in the back. Even a wee bit of airflow is enough to drop drive temps considerably -- they're typically <7W idle and these days, not more than ~10W max. For a green drive, it is a couple watts lower.
I am working on a simple meshed frame that fits in two or three 5.25" slots, that would simply fit the installed killers and could as well hold a fan if needed for cooling 7200+rpm drives. It will hopefully be available soon too.
"green" drives do not really need extra airflow if there is a free 5.25" bay above them to dump the heat to - this is my private opinion

- especially after looking at that google document.