Figuring out which breaker controls this plug shouldn't be that hard. Instead of being a 15 amp breaker it will probably be 30 or else there will be two 15 amp switches in tandem.

Actually that is a good point, the setting may not matter until sh1t hits the fan and it needs to protect the machine. I guess if you overclock you should also be more aggressive at protecting the processor. Thing is, if you do something that stresses the CPU (eg. a game) you could be too conservati...

I spent a little bit of time playing with the ASUS AI program (software that allows you to overclock in the OS instead of doing it in the BIOS before loading Windows). I found it interesting that the throttle back setting wasn't one of the things that could be altered by this program. One would thin...

I finally got sick of that 120 Gb Western Digital Noise Box so I removed it last weekend and installed a second 200 Gb Seagate. To be honest, the read noise is quiet bad with these Seagates while the write noise is surprisingly quiet. Having more silent components to begin with makes a huge differen...

I have an ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard and I noticed in the power section of the BIOS that there is a Throttle Slow Clock Ratio setting (by default 50%). The booklet for the motherboard explains it very briefly/ambiguously as "Allows you to select the duty cycle in throttle mode 87.5%".....down ...

Thanks for the replies. My main challenge now is to find a supplier nearby for the elastic masterial. I agree with your ideas that discontinuing the use of the drive is smarter, but I just feel stupid having a 120 Gb sitting on a shelf somewhere. The only place I can put the hard drive is in a CD ba...

Are there different techniques for reducing the noise of overall hard drive spin noise/whine vs. the crunching sound you get when read/write operations are going on?

I find myself with 2 hard drives with opposite issues.

200 Gig Seagate - loud read/write noises
120 Gig WD - loud overall whine

Seagate SATA drives are still quiter than the new Maxtors, but they are noisier than the PATA Models. On-board SATA RAID is very cheap and very effective (NF3 250 is anyway). Most SATA controllers out there don't support NCQ yet, some drives do, but the performance loss/gain depends on what you are...

NCQ appears to be something that takes advantage of hyper-threading techniques to better manage use of the hard drive when multiple tasks are undertaken. I looked at some Storagereview benchmarks and the 160 Gig NCQ drive did jump up a fair amount on file server type benchmarks. In the end SCSI driv...

Only issue I had with this method is that I wanted to put a cool pack on top of the drive (not only under it) but I decided against covering that "do not cover hole" on the drive. To my knowledge, that hole is only to ensure the air pressure is equalised in the drive. I doubt it'd make much differe...

What is the NCQ and it's meaning with respect to noise and/or performance.

I'm looking for a 160 Gb to 250 Gb hard drive that is pretty quiet...possibly 2 of them as I have onboard RAID I could be using.

Is Seagate still the way to go?

Only issue I had with this method is that I wanted to put a cool pack on top of the drive (not only under it) but I decided against covering that "do not cover hole" on the drive.

Thanks for the the reply. I think I can cope a lot better with the seek sounds than the constant whine I currently get from my WD 120 Gb drive. Some have said that the Samsung Spinpoint drives are very quiet, I wonder if this company has produced hard drives for long enough to really determine how r...

I recall seeing a post somewhere about a month ago saying that some people were seeing problems with Seagate Barricudas in a RAID setup. I was just wondering if anyone has experienced the problem and more importantly been able to rectify it. I was looking to go with 2 200 GB drives in my own RAID se...

My application of Sorbothane to prevent it from insulating the drive. Works fan-freaking-tastic: That's a good idea...only the bottom is covered, but you've also got it in one of those quick swap cases to give the bottom some room to disperse heat. have anyone tried metal springs? elastic band and ...

Honestly, great music coming out of Finland these days. Compare metal bands there to ones in Canada and you'll just start to laugh if you're in my position. Not to mention the concerts, practically non-existent here. Tuska, Nummirock, Provinssirock etc. I only know a very small amount about it there...

Forget "crafty" shops -- go to a good sewing shop. Hobnob w/ladies and ask them about the round cross-section elastic. It's been in all of the 3 sewing shops I've tried, in various diameters and stretchiness. Well it was a fairly decent sewing shop I would guess, it's not my area I've got to admit....

Responding to a bunch of you, thanks a bunch for the input I really appreciate the ideas. For me I'm resting the drive on blocks of Sorbothane. They're quite tacky and grips on pretty tight to the drive and the floor of the case. I'm a little nervous about having the Sorbothane come into direct cont...

I prefer sorbothane to elastic suspension, but my (not necessarily valid) hypothesis is that an elastic material will absorb / dampen some of the vibration, and that may be healthier for the hard disk than having it vibrate while suspended. I'd have to read a little more about the method of using s...

I was just wondering if the material used for suspension of a hard drive mattered much. People seem to prefer elastic type material and I'm not sure why that would matter. What would happen if I just used a thin industrial rope or something to suspend it. Is there something about that material that ...

As for noise benefits, the coolpacks seem to do a fairly decent job of damping vibration, although not quite as good as elastic suspension. I wonder what the benefits are if you combine both suspension and cool packs. You might have to leave a little more room in the elastics to allow for the thick...

This topic has been covered very thoroughly several times here at SPCR. Use the search and all the points that have been brought up in this thread will be answered. Fair enough, as you say in another post ( http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=14195 ), you simply need to look for a BX a...

I set a coolpack on top of one of my hard drives while it was attached to the rack. It appeared to make no difference to the noise level, and didn't appear to cool the drive either (the drive was probably 35 C idle anyway). My conclusion is that without a decoupling style of hard drive "mount", the ...

There are theads on the forum where boxes are combined with a Zalman heatpipe harddisk cooler. I'm coming to the conclusion that experimentation is the only answer. I can't see how putting a box made of a material such as rubber would have much of an advantage with a heatpipe cooler. Why? I simply ...

Almost no low speed Panaflos w/ RPM support exist. I have never seen one for sale anywhere, so there is a 99% chance that your L1A doesn't have RPM support and that's why Asus probe isn't detecting anything. Fair enough, that was the type of logic I was looking for. I'm not really into sticking my ...

Project wrote:not all panaflo's have rpm monitoring

How do I know if it is supposed to have rpm monitoring or not then?

No my mistake, I did use the 3 wire cable. It's a low flow Panaflo 80 mm fan.

Maybe I do need to try that trick in Speedfan.

I've got an ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe Motherboard with a case fan attached to the PWR_FAN connector on the motherboard. Can anybody explain why I do not get a reading on ASUS Probe (reads temps, voltages and fan speeds) under the Chassis fan or Power fan reading? When using Speedfan, I get a similar abse...

What you are describing here is diffraction - sound waves run along the flat face of the front of the speaker and on hitting the sharp edges are slightly retransmitted, the sharp edges act as virtual sound sources. Unfortunately this sound is out of phase with the original signal and only serves to...

Well here's what the case looks like from the front. The main reason this setup is so quiet (IMHO) is the distance of the fan from the front of the case. It sits back a full 9" from the front, plus the airflow makes several turns in the process. You'll have to try it to know for sure. Imitation is ...