Aluminum foil wrapper for laptop hard disk?

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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Rebellious
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Location: EU, USA

Aluminum foil wrapper for laptop hard disk?

Post by Rebellious » Wed Mar 27, 2013 5:45 am

The 2.5" disk in my Samsung laptop comes wrapped in an aluminum foil envelope. There is also a piece of aluminum over the memory modules. I replaced the disk with an OCZ Vertex SSD, but I didn’t reuse the aluminum pocket because the SSD seems to have an aluminum case of it’s own.

What is the purpose of the aluminum wrapper?
- Heat dissipation for the disk?
- Anti-static protection?
- EMI/RFI protection from interference caused by nearby components inside the laptop?
- Noise/vibration suppression?
- Airport x-ray machines?

Here's what it looks like:
Image

Spoon Boy
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Re: Aluminum foil wrapper for laptop hard disk?

Post by Spoon Boy » Wed Mar 27, 2013 7:00 am

From the small indents in the aluminum foil it looks like it maybe protecting components that where directly under the drive.
But in all honesty im just guessing, is it padded ?

CA_Steve
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Re: Aluminum foil wrapper for laptop hard disk?

Post by CA_Steve » Wed Mar 27, 2013 7:14 am

Could also be a heat shield to protect the HDD controller from whatever the HDD was crammed up against.

Rebellious
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Re: Aluminum foil wrapper for laptop hard disk?

Post by Rebellious » Wed Mar 27, 2013 1:03 pm

Spoon Boy wrote:From the small indents in the aluminum foil it looks like it maybe protecting components that where directly under the drive.
But in all honesty im just guessing, is it padded ?
The photo is not mine, I found it while googling and linked it. My disk is completely wrapped in aluminum foil and the mounting screws hold the foil in place.

CA_Steve
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Re: Aluminum foil wrapper for laptop hard disk?

Post by CA_Steve » Wed Mar 27, 2013 2:33 pm

Completely wrapped implies there were issues with EMI.

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