Jay_S wrote:can still hear it downstairs, though, although it's only moderately above the ambient noise level.
Christ! Your pc's are vibrating your floors to such a degree that you can hear this through the ceiling of the room below?
Yep, mildly. It's pretty nifty, actually. The high HZ noise also bounces down the stairs against the walls.
Jay_S wrote:
Couldn't I just stick some kind of noise absorbing material under the case? I'm also considering putting some kind of material immediately behind the case to handle the fan exhaust noise.
You can absolutely stick stuff under your case and behind the exhaust fans. But these are bandaid fixes to what appears to be a much larger problem - why are your machines such jackhammers? There are ways to decouple hard drives withour resorting to loose suspension. For example, I really like the way this poster did it:
That's a little unwieldy when you have six drives.
Jay_S wrote:
my data's simply too valuable... the potential risk to data integrity and drive lifespan isn't a risk I'm willing to take just yet...
...but then:
I can't really justify more than $5/ea as I need to buy about six 8cm fans.
You have priceless data on machines that are running 24/7 and can't spend more than $30 on fans? I don't mean to sound rude, but $30 is dinner for 2 or a couple of rounds of drinks. Surely you could budget
these in somehow.
Nope, I can't. I won't pay for the Lexus of fans.
Brands like Panaflow and Nexus pimp to the 'silence crowd'. Many will pay whatever to get 'quiet'. You can get plenty quiet by buying something cheaper, I don't doubt. If that's not possible, I'll do without, but I'm not going to overpay for something so I can simply pimp that I have awesome Nexus fans or whatever.
Besides, I already spent the money on the drives. That's the whole point of running RAID 5 for data, RAID 1 for OS, and backing up to a completely separate RAID 5 array in a different system. I paid for the important part already, redundancy. And I already have fans, they're just loud. When I lived in a house with carpet floors it honestly wasn't a bother to me. Wood echoes a lot more.
Further, I hear so many bad things about Panaflo fans and quality control I wouldn't want to buy any for that price. With horror stories about stuff like Chinaflows, I'd rather get the $3 fan and take my chances; I'm taking my chances anyway with a Panaflo. Meanwhile Nexus is rumored to be far better, but the price is quite high.
I bought a random Yate Loom 12cm fan and at +5V it's actually pretty quiet, at least for my purposes. I'd like something similar in a 8cm factor -- good enough -- but not $10/ea.
Jay_S wrote:
I have three noisy 8cm fans in there now ...
Have you tried running your existing fans at 5v? You can do this for free with the simple wire mods.
I could. But they're really cheap. I'd rather replace them with fans that don't whine so much. Two are already wearing out and need to be re-oiled or replaced anyway. Might as well replace them with, if findable, fans that are reasonably priced, but still considered mildly silent @ +5V. I don't need the Lexus of quiet, but something reasonably inexpensive that may fail for most SPCRers is probably fine for me.
Jay_S wrote:
Socket 370/Socket A HSFs for my dual 733MHz P3 system
Whoa, I should be receiving my new/used 733 P3 socket 370 system this afternoon. Coppermines at this speed can be reliably cooled without fans - the Dell I'm getting is already sorta passive (it has only a heatsink and a plastic duct to the rear case fan), and I plan to improve on that quite a bit.
I've often thought about trying something like
this for decoupling the pc case from the floor. If you can't suspend your drives, suspend the whole thing!
Jay
Can you? These CPUs run around ~ 40C with the stock HSFs. I don't know that I'd feel comfortable running them completely fanless unless I could stick a large, expensive passive HSF on it and that's more expensive than a quiet HSF.
I know many like to mod. I don't. I'm not seeking the perfect solution. I'm just looking for a reasonably priced solution to reduce the noise to a more acceptable level.
And I don't believe I need to blow $10/ea for quieter fans just to accomplish that. Given how creative many here are with random stuff from Home Depot and whatnot, I was hoping for a thrifty solution that minimizes both cost and deployment time.
I'm sure there's a minimum cost function for that, somewhere.