HDD silence. Beyond the rubber band!

ascii · Post by **ascii** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 9:53 am

Hello!

I have been a rather odd silencing-enthusiast for a couple of years. My previous silent solution was simply to get a long monitor cable and a USB extension cord and throw the computer into the closet.

This providad a completely noisless computer with several practical drawbacks with regards to placement, convinience, etc. For various reasons I have recently started anew with a more conventional quiet case.

I have methodically upgraded my computer until a point where I am fairly pleased with it. This includes switching every fan in the case (including the PSU fan), using fan controllers, undervolting and suspending my HDD in a home-made elastic suspension Ã¡ la novibes; the usual list of improvements from SPCR.

The largest remaining problem is that I can still easily hear the HDD, even when it is idle. My case is located about 2 meters away from my ears. My elastic suspension has made the seek noise less apparent, but this was never a major issue, since most of my files are accessed through the local network. I read several reviews implying that using novibes would make the HDD inaudible. To be quite honest, I don't think my elastic suspension made a whole lot of difference compared to the rubber grommets supplied with my case. Am I the only one not impressed by the performance of an elastic suspension? Is my drive unusually noisy? Did I perhaps tighten the elastic bands too much? Am I simply a whiny and unreasonable perfectionist?

Anyway, I am thinking about buying a A.C. Ryan Xilence to decrease the idle noise, does anyone have an opinion as to whether this will help?

I am grateful for any suggestions.

Here are the relevant specs for my computer:

Athlon64 3000+ CPU @ 1.3 Volts
ASUS K8v Motherboard
Antec Overture case
Seagate Barracude 7200.7 160 GB SATA HDD
The PSU fan has been replaced by a 80mm ADDA fan
The rear case fan has been replaced by a 92mm ADDA fan with a Fan-mate 2
The CPU fan has been replaced by a 80mm ADDA fan with a Fan-mate 2

Planning on replacing the stock heatsink with a Thermalright XP-120, but it isn't available for purchase in Sweden just yet.

peerke · Post by **peerke** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 11:26 am

"Am I simply a whiny and unreasonable perfectionist?"

Well, if you are I'd say you're at the right place so join the club

!
Welcome to SPCR!!.

I know my Smart Drive works very well on my Maxtor HD but don't have experience with and have never heard of the Xilence. They look similar, but that's not saying much.

rtsai · Post by **rtsai** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 11:31 am

ascii wrote:I don't think my elastic suspension made a whole lot of difference compared to the rubber grommets supplied with my case. Am I the only one not impressed by the performance of an elastic suspension? Is my drive unusually noisy?

In my experience, the elastic will only get rid of vibration noise (HD against frame/cage/whatever). Suspension will not help if the drive motor itself is noisy.

nova · Post by **nova** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 11:45 am

ascii wrote: Planning on replacing the stock heatsink with a Thermalright XP-120, but it isn't available for purchase in Sweden just yet.

I guess you're thinking of buying the A.C. Ryan Xilence at komplett.se if you look at their cpu coolers you'll find the xp-120.

ascii · Post by **ascii** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 11:56 am

Peerke:
I couldn't find the Smartdrive for sale in sweden, so I ordered something similar. It was either the Xilence or trying to remove the fan from a Coolermaster Cooldrive and see what would happen. The Xilence looks like a potentially much quieter solution, but it's hard to tell from a few pictures.

rtsai:
That sounds reasonable, I guess. I was just hoping for more. Well, I guess I'll see of the a cage will help.

Nova:
Yup, I've made an order of the XP-120 and the Xilencer a few days ago, but they only have an UNCONFIRMED shipping date of sept 21 last time I checked. So if I'm unlucky, I'll get the heatsink by christmas...

ascii · Post by **ascii** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 11:59 am

Oh, and thank you for making me feel welcome, peerke.

imaputz · Post by **imaputz** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 4:35 pm

didn't see any info regarding 10k drives. Need something to tame the beast and allow me to possibly upgrade to Raptors later on.

What's the pricing on these?

luminous · Post by **luminous** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 8:14 pm

I will have to agree with rtsai. Drive suspension only helps with seek noises. Drive whine is not reduced using suspension. When you suspend a drive you isolate it from the case. This reduces the vibrations transmitted to the case during the seek process. The reduced vibration (de-coupling) is what reduces the noise.

Drive whine is related to the drive's motor. The only way to reduce this noise is to put something in between the noise source and your ears. This normally means a HDD enclosure, and/or sound proofing in your case.

peerke · Post by **peerke** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 8:56 pm

ascii wrote:Oh, and thank you for making me feel welcome, peerke.

No problem ascii.
Please let us know your experience with the Xilence once you've tried it (hopefully before X-mas

) so we can all benefit from your purchase.

wim · Post by **wim** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 9:06 pm

please note that your HD (160G 7200.7) is a moderately loud drive to begin with, i have one myself and it's for sure the loudest thing in the system.

i agree with luminous abt the drive whine noise.. but i think relocation methods are the most effective way to get silence when it's got to the stage where all you can hear is the hard drives

burcakb · Post by **burcakb** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 10:29 pm

ascii wrote:To be quite honest, I don't think my elastic suspension made a whole lot of difference compared to the rubber grommets supplied with my case. Am I the only one not impressed by the performance of an elastic suspension?

As has been pointed out and you yourself admit, there's no end to silencing

However, re the comment you made above, I have to disagree. The advantages of elastic suspension are not immediately obvious. Mounting a drive with grommets still allows vibrations to pass to the case and the increased noise seems to come from the case itself, not the hdd. So you assume your case is noisy whereas it's the hdd that is the problem.

I've also suspended my two 7200.7s. A few days ago, for reasons too stupid to explain, I removed the suspension and placed the drives on rubber grommets on my Sonata. At first I thought there was no noise difference. I only realized the difference at night while trying to sleep. The hollow, metal rattling from the case had increased significantly.

Gxcad · Post by **Gxcad** » Wed Sep 15, 2004 12:02 am

I agree that elastic suspension does NOT make ANY harddrive inaudible (well, maybe notebook drives are an exception, no comment on those). I find the comments of many members here (including Mike C!) about the wonders of elastic suspension to be grossly exagerated. While it makes a HUGE improvement over hard mount or even over resting on sorbothane, elastic suspension will not make any full size hdd inaudible even in a solid quiet steel case.

I also agree that elastic suspension is noticably superior to grommet or sorbothane mounting. Elastic suspension eliminates vibration transfer to the case better than ANY other method, wheras vibration can be faintly felt when a full size samsung placed in a carving rubber enclosure in placed on strips of sorbothane. Initially this audible difference feels negligible, but as mentioned when transmitted through the case and heard over an extended period of time in a quiet ambient environment, is quite significant. I currently have my samsung in rubber enclosures sitting on sorbothane and feel I have to seriously reconsider my harddrive quieting setup. Oh and idle noise is still CLEARLY audible, there are plenty of holy grail of silence seeking here in the forums of SPCR, and some of us have extra sensitive hearing, you are not out of place at all!

-Ken

ascii · Post by **ascii** » Wed Sep 15, 2004 12:40 am

OK, thank you for the input. everyone. Sounds like I'm not the only one who 's not satisfied with elastic suspension alone. I guess the Seagat 7200.7 I have wasn't the best thing to buy... I bought it becase it was rated at 25 dBA whereas the Spinpoint was rated at 27 dBA in the stores. I obviously should have checked for forum posts before buying it.

I'lll post my findings when I get the Xilencer. Unfortunatly, I don't have a dB-meter, and the most sensitive dB-meter I can find here in Sweden only goes down to 30 dBA. Because of this I probably won't be able to give you concrete numbers.

luminous · Post by **luminous** » Wed Sep 15, 2004 12:58 am

Forget about dB meters, the results are pretty much meaningless. The only good way to measure sound is with a human ear, and then describe what you hear.

The "smoothness" of a noise is often much more important than the actual amount. As an example, a fan is often loud, but a relatively pleasant sound. Whereas HDD whine is a pain in the butt, even if it is quiet.

hvengel · Post by **hvengel** » Thu Sep 16, 2004 10:03 am

In addition to the whine many (most) hard drives vibrate at lower freqs. For 7200 RPM drives this is typicaly around 129 HZ. When I had my drives suspended on rubber gromits I noticed a low pitched hum that I had a hard time locating becuse it seemed to come from every where in the PC. I used a mic and a strctrum analyzer to probe around inside the PC and finaly isolated it to the hard drives. I also noticed that I could, just bairly, feel the vibration in the case with my hand. After suspending them the vibration and 129 Hz noise were gone. So suspension helps with both seek and low freq noise reduction. But it does nothing about whine.

gmontem · Post by **gmontem** » Tue Sep 21, 2004 10:30 am

I wonder if it is possible to put in a little tweeter of some sort and a little mic near the hard drives so it can produce noise that will cancel out the hard drive whines and maybe other noise in the system.

luminous · Post by **luminous** » Tue Sep 21, 2004 11:09 am

You would need to produce white noise at the same sort of power as the HDD whine. I'm not sure you would even need a mic, as you would need to broadcast all the frequencies the HDD did NOT make.

I suppose you could give it a go, maybe you will be successfull, who knows ??

hvengel · Post by **hvengel** » Tue Sep 21, 2004 12:36 pm

Phase cancelation of noise does not work very well at higher freqs. In addition, it really does not work well at the source. Most because the source in this case is large compared to the wave length of the noise (high freq = short wave length).

ascii · Post by **ascii** » Tue Sep 21, 2004 12:44 pm

If you want an active sound cancelling system, you need some rather special conditions.

Imagine two speaker making exactly the same pure tone, placed more than a wavelength apart. If you are standing so that the difference in distance to the two speakers is a whole number of wavelengths, the will amplify each other perfectly. If you are standing so the difference in distance between the two speakers is a whole number of wavelengths PLUS A HALF, the speakers will cancel each other out.

In much the same way, if you are going to cancel out the noise from any soundsource, you always need to know the exact distance from the source to the ear.

You can buy special ear protections that feature active sound protection, because if you mount a microphone and a speaker very, very near the ear, you know the noise and any sound generated by the phones will take almost exactly the same route to the users ears. If you take of the headphones, you will hear they actually make an audible noise, because when you aren't wearing them, the assumption about both sounds taking the same route will be false.

If you want to cancel out a sound at it's source, the sound source must be much smaller than a wavelength of sound, and the sound canceller must be much nearer than a wavelength. Since a HDD is about 15 cm long, this means that the frequency must be much lower than 2400 Hz, maybe around 300 Hz and below. Pretty much useless, in other words.

In theory, it might be possible to make a computer with a small air ventilation hole, and put a sound canceling system in this hole. If the rest of the case does not allow sound to be transmitted this might actually work, but I doubt it is feasible.

ascii · Post by **ascii** » Tue Sep 21, 2004 12:46 pm

Darn it, I spent 15 minutes writing up a long an boring explanation of why something doesn't work only to notice that while I was typing away hvengel went ahead and said exactly the same thing in one sentance!

luminous · Post by **luminous** » Tue Sep 21, 2004 12:52 pm

I like science ascii. hvengel went straight to the point, but you explained it nicely to me. Your explanation was not completely wasted.

ascii · Post by **ascii** » Tue Sep 21, 2004 12:57 pm

Thanks luminous! Feels a bit better now. :

Spod · Post by **Spod** » Wed Sep 22, 2004 4:20 am

ascii wrote:In theory, it might be possible to make a computer with a small air ventilation hole, and put a sound canceling system in this hole. If the rest of the case does not allow sound to be transmitted this might actually work, but I doubt it is feasible.

Assuming you could make a case that doesn't transmit sound except through two smallish holes for ventilation, you could make a fortune even without the sound cancelling technology!

ascii · Post by **ascii** » Wed Sep 22, 2004 4:46 am

Spod: You sure? The impedance difference between metal and air should mean that almost none of the sounds produced in a case are directly transmitted through the case.

Unless I'm mistaken, the two mail ways for sound to ge through the case should be:

1). Resonance. If some part of the case has a resonance frequency in the audible spectra, the case could easily be made to hum at this frequency. This can be dealt with by dampening the case with cheap lead mats which can be bought for just a few bucks at any self-respecting DIY HIFI store.

2). Transmission through air, i.e. sound getting through the airvents and other holes in the case.

Building a nearly airtight (except for ventilation holes) case with lots and lots of lead dampening mats doesn't sound that hard or expensive. But if you still have those air vents spewing out sound... It won't do you much good. And I really don't think an active sound cancelling technology is an effective silencing solution.

Spod · Post by **Spod** » Thu Sep 23, 2004 7:28 am

Resonance is bad, but non-resonant frequencies can also be transmitted through the case, though I accept that much of the noise comes through air gaps, especially if you use extensive dampening, grommeting and suspension materials & techniques.

I wasn't being scientific enough. I was thinking "a case that doesn't let out any sound, except through a couple of small holes". Transmit was perhaps the wrong word to use.

Mamu · Post by **Mamu** » Fri Sep 24, 2004 3:33 pm

Lol I think we are moving away from the point here

How to really make his harddisk more quiet... im very interested because I have the same harddisk and the same problem....
Although I have more whining noises... or so it seems

HDD silence. Beyond the rubber band!

HDD silence. Beyond the rubber band!

Re: HDD silence. Beyond the rubber band!

Re: HDD silence. Beyond the rubber band!

Re: HDD silence. Beyond the rubber band!