Those who bemoan the noise in WD HDDs should get a kick out my system. A big thanks to the forum members for getting me on the quiet/silent bandwagon! Your advice and suggestions have been invaluable in my quest to not hear my PC running idle from the next room.
Chenbro "Gaming Bomb" Xpider (I) case, front bezel / rear grill modded
PC P&C Turbo-Cool 300, Panaflo L1A mod
120mm Panaflo L1A exhaust, 7V (with those overrated Verax sticks)
Intel SE440BX2 mb
P-III 500 (Katami)
Some old PC P&C heatsink, stock fan replaced with a 92mm SuperRed, 7V
384MB PC-100 Micron SDRAM
Adaptec 2940UW adapter
...and the punchline...
WD 9150 10,000rpm UW SCSI "Enterprise" drive - a real screamer!
You all probably think I'm insane using a drive like that, but it's remarkable just how much I have quieted it down. I have it suspended under the hdd cage with sewing elastic (somewhat like the Aphonos method) with a 3" thick block of eggcrate acoustic foam underneath it, with the middle "fingers" hacked out for better airflow. The piece of foam is a rectangle just a bit wider than a 3.5" drive, so that the sides of the drive barely rest on the outer "fingers" of the eggcrate. Most of the weight of the drive is supported by the suspension though.
Eventually when I upgrade my system, I'll be shopping for a 7200.7 or something similar, but I like the challenge with my current setup.
Just as an indicator how far I have come in the quieting/silencing realm, as of about a year ago the above innards were housed in a Gateway "ivory-tower" case, pretty much stock. HDD was hard mounted to a bracket above the PSU (which had the loud stock fan), and I had a horribly loud Thermaltake 80mm exhaust next to the HDD bracket. If that's not bad enough, the previous HDD in that case was a Micropolis Tomahawk SCSI that sounded like the spindle ran off a chain drive. Those of you that remember that drive also know that it was double-height, weighed a ton, and ran so hot you could fry an egg on it. One of these days I might spinrite it and see if it still works...
I'd love to hear your comments - hope someone found this amusing.
Good for a laugh - quieting a LOUD hdd!
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Undervoltron
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SometimesWarrior
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Re: Good for a laugh - quieting a LOUD hdd!
This was the part that made me laugh:
You're the first silencer I've come across on these forums who deliberately left a noisy component in his system just for the fun of silencing it!Undervoltron wrote:Eventually when I upgrade my system, I'll be shopping for a 7200.7 or something similar, but I like the challenge with my current setup.
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Undervoltron
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Besdes that, it's only a 9.1gig drive, so I have to be really stringent with my partitions, pagfile, etc. This with 700MB as a dedicated partition for use as cache when burning CD-Rs.You're the first silencer I've come across on these forums who deliberately left a noisy component in his system just for the fun of silencing it!
It really forces you to eliminate waste in the filesystem.Actually, I'm not deliberately using a loud component on a whim - it's just that I can't justify spending the $ on a new HDD at this point - this one still performs great (other than noise & heat) and eventually when I upgrade the whole system I'll go for a new drive. I'm just not willing to bog down the IDE bus any more at this point with a quiet drive that is not going to perform much better or (in some cases) even as well as a 10,000rpm SCSI - even one that's quite old!
Basically I'm either a cheapskate or have more pressing things to spend money on, depending on how you look at it.
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sgrossklass
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Should you ever come across a used Cheetah 36ES (68-pin) for cheap (they're not really expensive these days, I paid little more than 50 EUR for an 18 gigger more than half a year ago), this would certainly make an excellent replacement for the old WD Enterprise (which is really long in the tooth by now) - think FDB.
I have two of these in separate systems, with different kinds of decoupling. The more recent decoupling method with the foam-supported (that slightly glossy stuff, from a DVD burner packaging in this case) and mat-dampened drive cage in the bottom front of the case works better for me (vs. NB-Swing on the other), with only some high-frequency access noise remaining, similar to what you get from 2.5" drives. I was amazed and preferred to connect the HDD LED to the HA, given a noise level or rather lack thereof like that is very easily drowned out even by quieter music when listening over 'phones, which I do frequently.
(That same computer used to have two old - '98 and '99 vintage - 5400 and 7200 rpm Seagate IDE drives with no decoupling before, and particularly the first-generation Barracuda ATA was rather nasty as a generator of hum and incredibly loud access noise; some whine was present, too. It easily drowned out the front case fan which became the loudest component after the drive swap. Now the sound is dominated by vibration from the PSU and front fans, depending on how fast the latter is spinning. Truly a day and night difference compared to the original state, which was unbearable.)
The only thing that bothers me at times is the motor whine (not extremely loud and pretty much isolated), which isn't easily absorbed due to being not as high in frequency as others. If both comps are running, I get some oscillation in the whine due to both drives running at almost identical frequency. (I had originally intended to use both in one system without thinking of this - no fun with open-air drive mounting as used in my duallie. I can't stand noises like that.) But overall I'm quiet, err, quite satisfied with the noise levels achieved so far. So much in fact that the last investments in hardware were, in that order, some more memory for my duallie (silent), a better sound card and now another, yet better sound card (everything used, of course, poor student), i.e. rather stuff to make more noise
.
I have two of these in separate systems, with different kinds of decoupling. The more recent decoupling method with the foam-supported (that slightly glossy stuff, from a DVD burner packaging in this case) and mat-dampened drive cage in the bottom front of the case works better for me (vs. NB-Swing on the other), with only some high-frequency access noise remaining, similar to what you get from 2.5" drives. I was amazed and preferred to connect the HDD LED to the HA, given a noise level or rather lack thereof like that is very easily drowned out even by quieter music when listening over 'phones, which I do frequently.
(That same computer used to have two old - '98 and '99 vintage - 5400 and 7200 rpm Seagate IDE drives with no decoupling before, and particularly the first-generation Barracuda ATA was rather nasty as a generator of hum and incredibly loud access noise; some whine was present, too. It easily drowned out the front case fan which became the loudest component after the drive swap. Now the sound is dominated by vibration from the PSU and front fans, depending on how fast the latter is spinning. Truly a day and night difference compared to the original state, which was unbearable.)
The only thing that bothers me at times is the motor whine (not extremely loud and pretty much isolated), which isn't easily absorbed due to being not as high in frequency as others. If both comps are running, I get some oscillation in the whine due to both drives running at almost identical frequency. (I had originally intended to use both in one system without thinking of this - no fun with open-air drive mounting as used in my duallie. I can't stand noises like that.) But overall I'm quiet, err, quite satisfied with the noise levels achieved so far. So much in fact that the last investments in hardware were, in that order, some more memory for my duallie (silent), a better sound card and now another, yet better sound card (everything used, of course, poor student), i.e. rather stuff to make more noise
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sgrossklass
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PS: Please excuse this longish post.
BTW, the Micropolis certainly wasn't double height but normal height - this already referred to the height two (half height) CD-ROM drives stacked! (Plenty big enough nonetheless.) Yup, Micropolis drives were known for being very loud, hot and unreliable, no wonder they went bankrupt in '97.
BTW, the Micropolis certainly wasn't double height but normal height - this already referred to the height two (half height) CD-ROM drives stacked! (Plenty big enough nonetheless.) Yup, Micropolis drives were known for being very loud, hot and unreliable, no wonder they went bankrupt in '97.
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sgrossklass
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Just for kicks:
Equipped with ye olde Adaptec SCSIBench, I have compared access noise levels of
1. the foam decoupled ST318406LW and
2. a 20 gig Travelstar 40GNX (salvaged from my poor fried notebook) on mounting rails, not decoupled but standing on a sheet of dampening mat in the fixed drive cage,
both in the same computer.
During strictly sequential access, the Travelstar surprisingly turned out to be noticeably more audible
, while during random access it's reversed and the Cheetah dominates (while still having a light, not overly obtrusive access noise). Hmm, that PSU fan hum sure is annoying... 
Equipped with ye olde Adaptec SCSIBench, I have compared access noise levels of
1. the foam decoupled ST318406LW and
2. a 20 gig Travelstar 40GNX (salvaged from my poor fried notebook) on mounting rails, not decoupled but standing on a sheet of dampening mat in the fixed drive cage,
both in the same computer.
During strictly sequential access, the Travelstar surprisingly turned out to be noticeably more audible
, while during random access it's reversed and the Cheetah dominates (while still having a light, not overly obtrusive access noise). Hmm, that PSU fan hum sure is annoying...