Nice contraption. I was looking for something like this a couple of years back and was disappointed to find that no such product existed. I'm just curious/worried about the durability.

As a matter of interest: "Tiché PC" means "Silent PC" in Slovak.

Thanks for the translation.

Larry made errors in assembly for the review; see the postscript added to the end of the last page. With the "springs" more evenly stressed, they should be fairly durable. The other "spring" HDD silencing devices -- NoVibes and the Antec Solo 1/2 -- all recommend checking the elastic portions periodically and replacing them if/when necessary. Ditto DIY spring devices.

Hi, thank you for nice review, we are very proud that Killer stand very good in it.

Some special details about Killer -> TichéPC Vibration Killer produced by ZoranICS is second version od first product which we sold for +/- 3 years http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5648912/oldkiller.JPG (photo from old model). The durability is perfect a very high number of clients who use old killer are very satisfied and they dont change the springs. Also we used a very high number of killers in our special silent PCs and some of them we clean 2x - 3x per year and springs are ok. But the mention of free spare springs is good idea.

Looks great. I really hate how useless optical drive bays are. I think case manufacturers should make them dual purpose themselves. Nice to have simple solutions that many of us have probably wanted or implemented ourselves. My concern is airflow, surely a simple adapter is possible that'll allow installation of a fan in proximity. Something that also allowed the area to act as air intake and have a filter is probably asking for too much .

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.

Is this product available in the US? If so, what is the street price?

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.

I think it will be available for some time , we speak with some sellers in US.

Also to the material I mentioned it in post before -> its semi-synthetic foam rubber which was specialy produced for this product. As i wrote a lot of clients of our PCs and also of product itself use this product (and also old models too) for 3 years and its ok....this is difference between other that kind of products where rubber after some period of time is hardened (cured?...i cant find good english word for that) and broken.

I think Zoran will write here too....

While the old version had much more rubber material than the new one, the material itself has long lifespan. Here is a piece which was used in different computers owned by me over 3 years (i think i have this one installed in wrong way as well, but it doesn't matter for one hard drive) :


As you can see, it is still in same shape as if it was brand new... Well, except the dust (sorry for that).

GABO, have you considered quietpc.com? They are placed in the UK.

I'd happily buy one if I can get it in the UK.

I contacted a few retailers and wholesalers around the world, quietpc was one of them iirc.



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.



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!



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.

I was slightly disappointed to see that the ones for sale are plain silver, instead of the funky orange/blue of the review sample.


Take advantage of free trade and by from the EU! The prices are usually lower than in the UK.


Could you perhaps make mesh 3.5" bay covers too? I'm sure it's something that quite a few people would want, and as far as I can tell, no one makes them.

Anodized parts should become widely available in a couple of weeks, please be patient
The funky colour combination was caused by my mistake by the way... we mixed up the parts during the anodizing process and since they are not symmetrical/interchangeable I had to combine two colours to get complete kits. I don't think we'll sell such combined ones - at least not on purpose
Three colous will be available for start: Black, Blue (same as the one in the review), and "red" - or, "sunset orange" as I like to call it. It is a tad more red than the ones in the review. If there will be demand for further colours we'll see what we can do.

Ok, call me silly but due to lack of time, can anyone post here a direct link to where these things can be bought from Tiche PC. I went there and did a search for "killer" but didn't find them. Or are these not yet available anywhere? (someone above was suggesting buying them from EU so I assumed they were)

It's in the article :
http://www.tichepc.sk/Vyhladavanie?arg0 ... n%20killer

Considering you will probably have some issues with the website in slovak language anyway (plus website doesn't describe the shipping costs to other countries anyway), i suggest you to write GABO, using email address tichepc@tichepc.sk.

Yikes ... that link is quite well hidden (3rd page towards the end). Why not put links to the manufacturer product page in the first table on the top of 1st page?

Regarding language, Google Translator works quite well (try it) but thanks for the suggestion.

Questions for GABO or ZoranICS:

1.
Do you know when the 4 drive version is going to be in stock? The website says one week, but usually store websites are unreliable (not always the case though).

2.
I found the article to be very nice but also ironic and frustrating for me: I recently drew plans and purchased plates to build an extremely similar cage but for up to 8 x 2.5" drives (we have professional laser cutting and drilling machines in the lab). Now I'm pondering to just purchase your 4x cage.

The difference to yours is that my side plates are meshed and I'll suspend the cage with elastics (unfortunately, I don;t have the time to design and hassle with a more proper mounting). The "advantage", so to speak, over yours is that I can fit it inside the HDD bay inside my Antec case where initially there were 4 x HDD caddys and that they will be cooled by the already existing 120mm fan (the mesh side plate will greatly help) soI don't have to either worry about heat nor eat up any 5.25" space. I can also cut and fit such a cage in the 3.5" bay (cut to just 4 x 2.5" drives).

My question to you is: would you consider building such a cage for 2.5" drives? I think it would be quite a successful product for reasons I outlined above.

I myself am going to put 6 or 7 of these little 2.5" drives in RAID5/6 and will thus have very decent speed, reliability and low noise -- 2.5" drives came a long way in terms of speed and in my (granted, brief) tests, 6x2.5" drives were more silent than 3x3.5".

Cheers

Edit: I'll post some pics once I build my 2.5" cage for anyone interested.

Certainly not impossible. It will require new aluminium and rubber profiles and that needs time to design, prototype and test.
4packs should be available on tichepc.sk shortly. Probably next week.

Looks like something I'd like to try! Are there already other European webshops that offer the single kit? I buy all my stuff from Azerty.nl, one of the best webshops in Western-Europe. Always cheap and a big stock - perhaps you should contact them?

I contacted Azerty.nl, we'll see. Thank you for the heads up.

By the way, If you are interested in getting our product to your country, to the shop you like, you could contact them asking for our product or let me know here whom to contact. Thanks.

I am certainly looking forward to using this product for one hard disk when I shall assemble a mini-ITX built in one of those tiny Lian Li cases.

What would the shipping cost for this product be if I should decide to purchase Vibration Killer for a single hard disk? I live in Denmark.

Please write us email on tichepc@tichepc.sk. On tuesday we will send reply for all single clients who asked about possibility to send one single item. As your country is part of EU i think it will be no high payment for transport by normal post (mail). Payment is prepayment on our account (better this way because cash on delivery is expensive.

This does look interesting and I'd have probably bought one for my brother's case to mount his secondary HDD, if I hadn't already bought the Scythe Hard Disk Stabiliser II.

For myself though I find the airborne noise from even modern HDD to be quite annoying (so much so that it rather negates the point of running slow and quiet case/CPU fans) and so I'm more inclined to use something like the Homebrew Enclosure in my own PCs which does a great job of stopping that.

Does the Scythe HDS II work stop all vibration from a hard drive?

Probably doesn't work as well as this (I haven't really evaluated it) but I expect it's good enough for my brother who's not as bothered/obsessed with noise as I am

MikeC / Lawrence Lee

How do think the performance of these Tiché PC HDD Vibration Killer compare with that of Noise Magic No Vibes III:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article39-page1.html

Haven't done a close A/B but iirc, it's very close.

I tried making a order but i couldn't because i can't register. Country is hardcoded as Slovakia. I live in Sweden.

@AckeDman :