What are some easy, preferably cheap, ways for me to silence my DVD drive a little? It gets very loud at times regardless of the operation (reading, burning, etc.). Any help is greatly appreciated.

BTW, I have a Silverstone GD05 and an OEM Sony 22X DVDRW (SATA).

I've heard Nero Drivespeed can work. There are probably other utilities that do the same thing.

Thanks for the link. Is regulating the drive speed the only known way this can be rectified?

It works quite well and has minimal impact on the amount of time takes burn a CD. It also improves the error rate.

The usual reason why the drive is sometimes loud is the inserted disk is imbalanced. The imbalance is transferred as vibration to the spindle and drive and through the mount to the case. The imbalance can have a resonant frequency. Lowering the drive speed a bit can stop the resonance peak which will lessen the vibration/noise. The obvious analogy is an imbalanced tire on your car that hits resonance at, say, 50mph. Drive 40 or 60 and it's not as bad.

If it happens on every disk, then it's a drive imbalance. Again, changing the speed can lessen the vibration/noise.

I'll give it a shot and see if the sound improves. I've managed to create a very quiet system, even at full load, but once the DVD drive is in use, the computer sounds like a blow dryer. Thanks for the help everyone.

I had some success sticking a heavy bitumen block on a drive, but the spin noise is undoubtedly the loudest component overall, and there your only choice is to slow it down. I switched from an LG to a Pioneer and suddenly the noise profile is less that of a blowdryer. Still loud, but not unpleasant.

I tried to install Nero Drivespeed last night and kept getting an error regarding a .dll not being found. Is this something with the download or my PC? I tried downloading from two different places and on two different computers with no luck. I'll get the exact file name when I get home tonight, but until then, does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks.

Maybe you'll have better luck with CD Throttle (aka CD Bremse).

Drivespeed is no longer a Nero product, so that may have something to do with it. May not be supported on Win 7, not sure. All the after market drive burner software companies are on life support now that Windows 7 has built in burner software.

I found out Drivespeed must be run as an administrator in Windows 7. I'll give it a shot once my I can steal the TV away from my wife.

No luck with DriveSpeed (or any other software) because they cannot recognize my optical drive for some reason. The software knows something is there, but nothing more. I was able to cut the sound in half by getting some thin rubber grommets between the screw heads and the case. I was pleasantly surprised how well this worked.

SPCR rule of thumb # 4.
always decouple spinning media before attempting other ways to silence the offending device.