Hackszine.com: Silence your hard drive

Silence your hard drive

For a buck's worth of materials, you can quiet your PC by damping your hard disk's vibration:

As the pictures show, the drive is essentially suspended on the stretched elastic. The resilience of the elastic stops all vibrations from passing from the drive to the case -- or vice versa, for that matter.
...

When I showed one of my suspended drive systems to my favorite local dealer, it was the complete absence of vibration in the case that amazed them the most. They could not tell when the PC was turned on by the usual vibration of the case. They found it eerie.

Keep in mind that you'll loose some of the conductive cooling that you get when the drive is mounted to the case, so it'd be smart to do this in cases where there is decent airflow or find a way to attach some sort of heatsink to the bungeed drive.

Hard Drive Silencing: Sandwiches & Suspensions

Posted by Jason Striegel | Apr 10, 2008 09:06 PM
PCs | Permalink | Comments (10)

Comments

Newest comments listed first.

Posted by: Alin Hanghiuc on April 10, 2008 at 10:54 PM

It looks to me that the hard drives are encased in something. What king of case is it?

Thanks.

Posted by: Jason Striegel on April 10, 2008 at 11:13 PM

I think that's just the normal hard disk enclosure, except the rails that normally mount to the hard disk have been removed. A big cdrom would normally fit that space, but when you have a hard drive you typically use the rails... or in this case, you use elastic strap. :)

Posted by: bachterman on April 11, 2008 at 1:03 AM

title?

this reminds me of dave's silent pc project. he used a similar solution for noise prevention.
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article237-page2.html

Posted by: bachterman on April 11, 2008 at 1:14 AM

one more thing: that blue foamy thing tells me that these drives have been disassembled recently...

Posted by: on April 11, 2008 at 4:25 AM

The Drives appear to be early (40gb ?) Seagate Barracudas. These had a blue foam bit between the drive and the PCB, and then a plate over the PCB.

I don't believe they have been modified in any way. They are just normal drives.

Posted by: Sean on April 11, 2008 at 12:59 PM

The Poster Stole This Idea and Photo

Stolen from here: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article8-page2.html

Posted by: Jason Striegel on April 11, 2008 at 11:53 PM

bachterman/sean,

Thanks for the catch! This wasn't stolen, only a cool article I intended to link to but borked the link. It happens sometimes.

Posted by: Brian on April 13, 2008 at 10:55 PM

Looks a lot like you stole the idea to me.

Posted by: Jason Striegel on April 14, 2008 at 12:03 AM

"Looks a lot like you stole the idea to me."
Now I stole your comment too! Muahahahaha.

Seriously guys, follow the link at the bottom of the article. It'll take you to the source, which has a lot of useful information beyond the excerpt I quoted.

I take author attribution seriously and I always include a link to the source for anything that's posted here. That's why I post it - it's something interesting that I want you all to go look at. Simple as that.

Occasionally, due to a typo or a random goof-up, a mistake is made. Soon after, someone informs me. Then, I fix it. I think this has happened about 3 times in the last year, which is about a 0.8% failure rate.

It sucks, but I'm human.

Let's get back to hacking.

Posted by: databaser on April 28, 2008 at 10:41 PM

Warning!

Do NOT use this to silence your computer, unless you're willing to loose your hard drives really soon.

As the drives are not attached to anything "solid" they start to vibrate causing the drives heads to touch the platters, scratching the surface.