Turning the volume down!!

j-azn · Post by **j-azn** » Tue Jan 04, 2005 7:57 am

hi,

i currently purchased the 250gb WD hd...without considering that it might be loud.. actually, i forgot to consider... ><

brought it home, popped it in...boot it up... and.. HOLY MOLY!! its sOOO loud!

i have a sonata case and a vantec nexus fan controller... and i tried turning the fans COMPLETELY off....its STILL very loud... theres 3 harddrives inside my sonata right now, a 80gb WD IDE a 250gb WD IDE and a maxtor 120gb SATA.... how can i reduce teh noise to a minimum without having to MOD my case..

really need help cuz now i hafta sleep on the other side of my bed to reduce teh noise im hearing.... lol....

thxthx

SebRad · Post by **SebRad** » Tue Jan 04, 2005 10:39 am

Hi, my personal opinion:
Buy Samsung or Seagate hard drives to your requirements, less is definitely more! i.e. 1 of 400GB much better than 3 of 120GB. 2 x 200GB could be good compromise of cost, capacity, flexibility etc.
Copy OS, apps, games, data etc to new drives. (Ghost is good!)
Sell old drives.
Place wallet in back of cupboard to muffle groans.
Relax in peace and quiet!
Seb

peteamer · Post by **peteamer** » Tue Jan 04, 2005 11:11 am

SebRad wrote:Place wallet in back of cupboard to muffle groans.

This is worthy of a thread of it's own....

EdT · Post by **EdT** » Tue Jan 04, 2005 11:58 am

I have a WD800JB too and its definetly the loudest piece of hardware on my PC now. You can quiet down the platter arm to inaudible levels by using this little program, but you can't do much with the spinning whine that you get.

User Guide:
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/f ... rguide.pdf

Download:
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.html

j-azn · Post by **j-azn** » Tue Jan 04, 2005 3:12 pm

its one of those DOS programs??
anyway, the link doesnt work, but i found another one featuretool_v195.exe... i suppose its the same thing right?

and sorry to be newb at this...
how do i use this program? and will it work for my other 2 hdd? if so .. ur my savior!! heheheh

jazn

wing · Post by **wing** » Tue Jan 04, 2005 4:36 pm

I don't know if turning down the seeks would help much; if the whine of my WD is anything typical, its whine was as loud as everything else in my computer combined.

EdT · Post by **EdT** » Tue Jan 04, 2005 10:30 pm

j-azn wrote:its one of those DOS programs??
anyway, the link doesnt work, but i found another one featuretool_v195.exe... i suppose its the same thing right?

and sorry to be newb at this...
how do i use this program? and will it work for my other 2 hdd? if so .. ur my savior!! heheheh

jazn

Yeah, thats the same proggie, you will need a floppy disk, install the proggie and it will make a start up disk with the proggie when you reboot.
After it reboots you will see a menu, select Automatic Acoustitic Management to "Enabled(128) and OK and reboot again
your seek arm will be almost inaudible. Yeah will work with most modern HDD made within thee last 3 years, it will detect those HDD and it will indicate if AAM is available.

j-azn · Post by **j-azn** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 8:20 am

thx EdT,

and Wing, wut would u suggest??

SebRad · Post by **SebRad** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 3:25 pm

Hi, being more helpful and less flip, is it the seek noise or the idle noise that's bothering you? The seek noise is the clicking/clattering noise when the drives are working, e.g. loading windows or programs, best example when de-fragmenting. The idle noise is produced all the time and is a constant whine or singsong.
Idle noise is bad and can only be helped by sound deadening in the case or drive enclosures, and these may not even be effective either. Drives that are quiet to start with are best bet, hence my post above.
Seek noise is much easier to deal with. I believe the Sonata has rubber grommets in its drive bays that help to decouple the drives and reduce seek noise, you may find with enabling AAM that it's enough. Full decoupling with elastic, string or foam will help some more. You may need to modify the case for this with 3 drives. You can find lots articles & threads on the subject here, search for decouple or suspension. (I'd give links to searches if I could figure out how)
Hope this is more helpful,
Seb

j-azn · Post by **j-azn** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 8:16 pm

i tested the drives by try to enable to AAM, it seems that both my WD harddrive already have it enabled only my 120gb sata (maxtor) was not.. nd im definitely sure its the IDLE noise thats annonying me because the working noise is acceptable as its WORKing for me..so i cant complain..but the idle whinning noise is unbearable for me.. and being sumone that leaves the computer on most of the time, i leave it on overnite and sleeping with it is rather difficult..so now i bring forth a new question..

how can i reduce...i m not even thinkin abt making it silent.....the whinning noise of 3 combined hdd... it seems that my new WD250 is makin the most noise out of the 3...
thxthx

jazn

wing · Post by **wing** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 9:00 pm

I don't know what to say other than find a new drive. SPCR's Recommended List is not very kind to Maxtor; but compared to my WD, even my Maxtor is "noiseless". Seagate and Samsung sound alright too. (Yes, I have all 4 brands, due to some stupidity on my part. But currently only the Samsung is actually in use. And no, the Seagate or Samsung is not silent, I can still clearly hear the seek noises.)

If working noise doesn't bother you but idle noise does, perhaps the Samsung won't bother you, normally, I can't hear its idle noise at all.

Perhaps other people who're more experienced can offer some insight. I just started silencing my computer less than 2 months ago.

j-azn · Post by **j-azn** » Thu Jan 06, 2005 5:57 am

well the last thing i want to do is having to change the drives because that wastes money (which i never have) and time (transfering gb and gbs of data)... BUT if it really really helps.. i'll do it slowly...

i just saw thought a of a new idea... after seeing some posts..wud it be possible to pull off an suspension withthe sonata hd bay with sewing strechys?? if so is it as efficent in sound dampening?? i only started silencing my comp awhile back.. and im enjoying it...

thxthx

Bitter Jitter · Post by **Bitter Jitter** » Thu Jan 06, 2005 9:03 am

Suspension is a very cheap and effective way to reduce hard drive noise and vibration. I just did it with my samsung and the difference is unbelievable i can't hear the seeks anymore. I would say its as quiet as my Nexus NX3000 now.
Its a cheap mod too, £1.50 to buy the elastic 10 minutes fitting time.

Of course my drive is quiet to start with but it should be pretty effective with those drives as well.
I have a maxtor hard drive in my tivo and i always considered it to quiet until I hard mounted it in my PC. It was the nosiest hard drive i had ever heard. Tivo uses rubber washers like those that EAR make.
Elastic should be even more effective than that so i can't hurt to try? Save you quite a bit if it works as well.

geordie · Post by **geordie** » Thu Jan 06, 2005 10:38 am

Sadly it is the idle whine that is annoying you so drive suspension won't really give you the noise reduction you're looking for.

Your options are:
1) Acoustipack (or similar) dampening for the sonata case.
2) Hard drive enclosures - silentmaxx, novibes etc
3) Replace the drives with Samsung or Seagate.

The Acoustipack may be a good start, and it could be enough to make the noise bearable for you.
If not then it's time to dig deep in the wallet, and to be honest, you're better off spending money on a quiet drive than an enclosure for your current drive.

j-azn · Post by **j-azn** » Thu Jan 06, 2005 1:00 pm

i totally agree on both ya advices.... it seems i shud start by refunding my recently purchased westeren digital 250... nd us the money to buy a seagate 160 or 200....

anyways are the seagate SATA drives more quiet then the UATA/PATA ones??

lastly, i need some advice on which HD to get..im leanin toward ONE big storage rather than a couple smaller ones.. i need atleast around 300gb of HD space... pls....i need something quiet .....

thxthx

geordie · Post by **geordie** » Thu Jan 06, 2005 2:01 pm

The biggest Samsung drive is only 160GB whereas 300GB Seagate drives are available. Having said that, you could probably get 2 x 200GB Seagate drives (ST3200822AS) for about the same price as 1 300GB (ST3300831AS), so that would be what I'd go for.

Some people are saying that Seagate ship SATA drives set to performance seek mode and PATA drives to quiet seek, so the SATA drive will be slightly faster but louder. As mentioned earlier, you can reduce seek noise by suspension mounting etc. And the idle noise should of course be identical between SATA and PATA drives, which is what you were interested in I think.

j-azn · Post by **j-azn** » Fri Jan 07, 2005 11:43 am

so i should buy DUAL 160/200 over 1 big harddrive???

dont mind the newbness... does a higher capacity harddrive tend to generate more whine/heat/vibration over smaller ones??

geordie · Post by **geordie** » Fri Jan 07, 2005 1:59 pm

I was thinking more about the value for money

A drive with more platters will be slightly hotter and louder than a drive with fewer platters within the same drive family. You cannot make this assumption between different manufacturers or even different drive families from the same manufacturer.

Two drives will be a little louder than one bigger drive from the same drive family. Of course, the point here is that 2 Seagate or Samsung drives would be quieter than your 1 WD

However, given the hardware you currently have and the objectives you stated in the first post, I would say 2 sensibly priced drives are a better bet than 1 very big drive. You pay a big price premium for the biggest drives (like the fastest processors etc) and you probably won't notice the difference in terms of sound. And of course having 2 drives has performance advantages over a single drive too.

My advice to you would be to check the prices of the various size drives and make the decision based on the cost for the total amount of space you want. Like I said in my last post, one 300GB Seagate drive is about twice as much as a 200GB Seagate drive (it was when I last checked Ebuyer anyway) so I'd be thinking 2x200GB was the better buy. But this is your cash so you need to decide make the decisions

j-azn · Post by **j-azn** » Fri Jan 07, 2005 8:20 pm

i did some noise-source investigations today on my case. I tried numerous combination of hardware turned on. The most noticeable noise maker is the HeatsinkFAn (volcano 9, must be replaced) then it's the 9600xt then the harddrives. With some thorough "listenning" to the drives, i find that the WD800BB i had purcahsed 2 years ago is whinning LIKE its stuffed, very VERY annonying. Suprisingly this 80GB hd had a JVC motor, one that is suppose to be QUITE quiet, well NOT quite here. Hence i edit what i said in earlier posts that the HD thats makin the most noise is the WD800BB not my WD250JB i purchased recently.

I know this doesn't really matter but i just felt like spilling it all out cuz i was so foolish that i thought the NEWER WD was making all the noise theni realize how much of an idiot i was.

As for replacing harddrives, i will work on that after i get my hands on the MSI 6600GT vid card and see the noise level and decide from then because as far as i can tell, my 9600xt is generating the most amout of noise, with my volcano9 to the MINIMUM off course.

Thanks for all ya advices

jazn

CyberBlade · Post by **CyberBlade** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 2:10 am

Hi everyone

The featuretool_v195 proggy sais that my HDD doesn't support Acoustic Management... Can it be true ?! It's a Seagate 120GB Sata 8mb 7200.7 ST3120026AS hard drive. It's seek mode is pretty loud and I want to keep it down using software.

burcakb · Post by **burcakb** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 2:37 am

The 9600XT has been known to be cooled passively with a Zalman NJ47 heatsink. Unless you're overclocking the card that is.

Suspension DOES help idle noise too. Try it.

CyberBlade · Post by **CyberBlade** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 5:52 am

CyberBlade wrote:Hi everyone
The featuretool_v195 proggy sais that my HDD doesn't support Acoustic Management... Can it be true ?! It's a Seagate 120GB Sata 8mb 7200.7 ST3120026AS hard drive. It's seek mode is pretty loud and I want to keep it down using software.

Okay ... I have asked Seagate and they said:

Seagate Suport Member wrote: Seagate has decided that we will no longer support AAM. Seagate is in the
process of removing all product information pertaining to the support of
AAM.

Our drives are extremely quiet while operating at the highest performance
levels, so we believe the ability to switch between Modes is unnecessary.

If you want a utility that will switch AAM modes you must procure it from
a third party. Seagate cannot make any recommendations as to what third
party utility you choose to use, nor do we in any way support the
utilities. However you can perform an Internet search for Automatic
Acoustic Management and select from the available 3rd party utilities.

So I tried suspending the drive and I am pretty happy with the results. A fan is highly recomended because the temps go up. I'm using a P4 box fan and the temps are around 29C (ambient 22)

jooppy · Post by **jooppy** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 12:29 pm

This may sound obvious, but if the HDD whine is only annoying you when the computer is idle or when you are trying to sleep, why do you not use the Windows Power Options to turn the disks off when idle?

Voila, problem solved, and it does not cost you a penny

Jooppy

Tibors · Post by **Tibors** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 2:25 pm

And then after 15 minutes or so windows decides to do something and the disks start spinning again. 10 minutes later the power saving feature turns the disks of. After 15 minutes #@#%#$$% windows turns it back on to................. The starting and stopping of the disks is way more irritating than a constant source of noise

There are at least two or three threads in this forum where people have unsuccesfully tried using the powersave mode to keep the disk of. It just doesn't work.

gianni · Post by **gianni** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 3:17 pm

I wanted to give the same suggestion of jooppy this morning.
Now that I have time to write I see somebody had the same idea... and that somebody doesn't agree.
Tibors, I have used Windows Power Options to stop my disks.
It's unuseful, if you have only one disk to stop, but usually it stops non-system disks.
I had two disk: the second was usually stopped for all the time I watched DVD, with less PSU noise due to less power required.
When I waked up in the morning, near my PC, both disks were usually stopped.
With three disk, on idle, you should usually have only one disk working, with less noise... I suppose

CyberBlade · Post by **CyberBlade** » Thu Jan 27, 2005 1:14 am

jooppy wrote:This may sound obvious, but if the HDD whine is only annoying you when the computer is idle or when you are trying to sleep, why do you not use the Windows Power Options to turn the disks off when idle?

Voila, problem solved, and it does not cost you a penny :lol:

Jooppy

Yeah ;) If it was idling of course .. maybe I want to download stuff or defragment it :) If not why don't I turn off my PC. Now that would make sense right? Anyway it's not the idle whining that troubles me - it's not noticeable - the seek search (write/read) is the one that makes my hdd noisy. Anyway the suspension has worked - lowered the noise the HDD was making during search but not silence it totaly. I guess I want too much huh ? Fast and quiet ... NOT ;)))

burcakb · Post by **burcakb** » Thu Jan 27, 2005 7:15 am

CyberBlade wrote: If not why don't I turn off my PC.

Because you're folding?