The guy on TechTV didn´t remove any of his disks. He just replaced the cover with a clear one and he killed 3/4s of the drives he did this to. In your case since you say you will through out the drive if you can´t get it quiter than you might as well go for it. But the odds of it working for very lo...

The WD Raptors also have much faster seeks than most IDE drives. The new 74GB drives have an average seek time around 5ms where as most current IDE drives are 8ms to 9ms. That is why the seek noise from the Raptors is so much loader than other IDE drives as the heads are moving much faster. By the w...

You will most likely kill the HD if you open it. On the Tech TV show the screen savers thier modder, Yosi, modded an HD by replaving the cover with one made out of plexiglass so you could see it working. He killed three drives before getting the fourth to work. And only Yosi knows how long the fourt...

These limit the min. fan voltage to 30% and this can be set for 30%, 40%, 50% or 60% of supply voltage. This does not seem like a major limitation to me since 30% would be like running a 12V fan at 3.6 volts. In addition the web site says to contact customer support if you need some other setting fo...

Have you had a look at these AC speed controls? http://www.controlres.com/catalog.htm#1

The local Fry´s Electronics has many Plextor SATA DVD drives that are customer returns. I was told by the sale person that people would buy them and when they got home would find out that the drive was SATA and they did´t have a SATA controller. So they would return the drive. I was there buying a P...

There is a trade off between how much memory a program uses and how fast it is for some software. As the original poster pointed out he is using this program because it is the fastest. Guess what it also uses more memory. Way back when memory was very costly programmers would spend huge efforts at m...

hvengel, Do any of those fanless ham radio PSUs have the ability to produce multiple voltage outputs (3.3, 5, 12) simultaneously? No they are a single fixed voltage and the output voltage can be adjusted. Some with an internal trimmer and some from the front panel. They also come in many standard o...

There are other brick options if the unit you have has a fan. If you go to Ham Radio Outlet (hamradio.com) you will find many fanless AC to DC power supplies in many power ratings. Some over 500 watts continous. These will be somewhat more costly and also much bigger and heavier than the unit you ha...

I just had my CDR die on me a few weeks ago and I replaced it with Pioneer DVR-A08XLA. At lower speeds (like playing a movie DVD or audio CD) it is extremely quite. When spun up to full speed it is much quiter than the Plextor CDR it replaced. Not silent but not bad either with a smooth character th...

Ford is using the ¨quite¨ steel for the firewalls of F150 pickups. They talk about it in the F150 advertisements.

Any thought MikeC on whether you could include ferdb's found AC fan in the 'big-honking' fan review? They appear to be very worthy of inclusion, despite being AC. Yes I agree. I have used AC fans to cool radio gear and the ones I have used do seem to have a very good CFM/db ratio. There are also so...

Also the fan blades and motor are fairly light and are running at much lower RPM than a disk drive. The disks and motor in the disk drive have much more mass than does the fan blades and motor in a fan. One way to think about the motor noise is to think about how much electric power is being used by...

If you use a spectrum analyser with a mic very close to a 7200 RPM disk drive you will see a peak at about 129Hz. This is close to 120Hz so it appears that the 7200/60 calculation is a good aproximation. Of course the actual ratational speed of a disk drive probably depends on the voltage that is su...

If you look at the diagrams you will see that the upper section with the mother board chamber and the exhaust passage is in fact a classic Helmholtz resonator. Although a very leaky one. So this is not an unrealistic concern. You are correct that leakage will have an affect on how well the resonator...

Since you have isolated the ¨buzz¨ (I think hum is the correct term assuming it is 60Hz) to your sound output from your mother board a better sound card should help this out. My step son just got a M-Audio Revolution 7.1 and he really likes it and says it is way better than the Audigy he replaced. T...

You have something in you audio chain that is not well designed to prevent RFI. Speaker wires and/or other wires leading into the device are acting as an antenna and the RF is getting into the device causing it to act as a radio receiver. This is not an uncommon problem particularly when the radio t...

I just had my Plextor 24/10/40A CD writter dye (it was in service for about 3 years) and I replaced it with a Pioneer DVR-A08XL. The Plextor was quite when running at lower speeds like you would use for playing CDs. But my new Pioneer is quite at all speeds that I have used it so far. It has some ki...

What you probably have is a perfect illustration of air resonance in a tube . (Hemholtz resonance) It's the basic phenomenon exploited by ported speaker enclosures. The air in that tube has at least a couple of resonances in the low freqs, and they are being "excited" by the basic noise of the HDDs...

I asked the author of MBM about this and he told me that most MBs will read fairly well down to about 600 RPM but not much lower. I have one fan that will speed up to about 700 RPM when it is hot and I am pushing my system hard and I will start to get readings at about 650 RPM. But below that I do n...

I have thought about this type of set up and my thoughts have moved in the direction of having a single intake passage and plenum that is ¨pressurized¨ with ¨cold¨ air and a single ¨hot¨ side outlet plenum that exits to the outside by it´s own passage. With an intake plenum you can direct cold air t...

I think that HE and EE are the correct names and I believe that these were rated at 55W and 35W. But these were also lower speed versions basicly the same as the A64 2800 and 3000 and these also run at lower voltages so are very close to the same as the A64M CPUs only for multi-CPU setups. But with ...

I would back out the new driver to test if this is really part of the problem. It could have been a coincidence that the new driver installation and the PSU whine started at the same time. If it is not a coincidence then the whine will go away. If the whine does not go away then you will need to loo...

You probably should look into getting a Winchester rather than a Newcastle as most of the reports are showing lower power consumption on the order of 20% to 25%.

Are the drives supended or are they hard mounted to the case? Can you better describe the buzzing sound?

¨If you get a board that will use the bus disconnect/stop grant built in to the k7, they seem to offer the lowest power usage at idle. I dont think nforce2 boards will allow this but the via boards do ( someone correct me if I'm wrong). ¨ This is not totaly correct. The following BIOS´s will work: K...

It also appears to be Windows centric. With the Tbalancer you can program the usint using Windows and it will function with any OS. In addition the Tbalancer interface API is published so it should be possible to build a control program for other OS´s.

I have been running a Matrox G450 with dual head. I am currently running SuSE 9.1 and have had zero problems with my video setup. Linux drivers for the G series Matrox cards are very good and has been for some time. You are right that the P series cards have very bad Linux drivers and Matrox does no...

¨As I’m writing this I notice that the CPU fan is ramping between 2 speeds again quite quickly. I guess that’s because the temp is close to a value set for a fan speed change, in this case 55C. Is this typical behaviour for Silentek?¨ I have not seen this happen. On my stepsons´s computer the fan sp...

Yes I agree the prices for this are very good considering the features. Assuming the it works as advertised.