Testing a Silentmaxx HD-silencer

[Steve_Y]

I bought a Nexus Drive-A-Way enclosure for use in a silent media centre PC I'm building, I wrote about my experience with it in this thread http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=23058. Since it'll be used to record video I decided that I'd probably need a second HDD for both performance and storage. I wasn't totally blown away by the seek noise silencing or cooling of the Nexus enclosure and I found a Silentmaxx HD-silencer enclosure at a bargain price in a local PC shop, so I thought I'd give it a try. I'm testing it with the same low noise PC and same noisy old IBM 40GV HDD that I used to test the Nexus.

The Silentmax enclosure certainly looked like it should cool a lot better than the Nexus, it's basically just a big aluminium heat sink and it looked like the HDD should make good contact. But most of the noise leakage from the Nexus enclosure was due to the direct contact the drive makes with the thermal pads in the enclosure lid. It seemed likely to me that the increased contact between the drive and Silentmaxx would increase the transmission of noise, especially as the Silentmaxx isn't lined with sound absorbing foam.

One thing that made a bad first impression was the lack of instructions included with the Silentmaxx. I was going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that the instructions were accidentally missed from my package. But reading some other comments about this enclosure it seems that they just don't bother to include them. It's not the most complicated device in the world of computing, but it wasn't entirely obvious to me what to do with the silicon film or foam sheet. Fortunately there was a PDF manual available from their website and the instructions were straight forward. But why couldn't they include a hard copy, or print the instructions on the box like Nexus did?

Putting it together was fairly time consuming as you have to stick self adhesive silicon film inside the enclosure and put in foam spacers. Being pretty clumsy I made a bit of a mess of applying the silicon film, I had to remove and reposition it a couple of times before it was correct. I'm not entirely sure what the silicon film is actually for, I can't see less than 1mm of material doing much to stop noise and I'd have thought direct contact with the metal would be better for heat transfer. With hindsight I should have tested it without the silicon to answer this question, but I'm not going to peel it off now that I've finally applied it correctly. Compared with a lot of things it's not really that much hassle, but I'd have thought the enclosure lining would be built in during manufacturing.

Even when it's assembled, putting a drive into the Silentmaxx isn't as easy as it could be. The drive fits in very snugly and the rubbery silicon film sticks to it a little, there's quite a lot of friction so it took some brute force to get my drive fitted correctly in the enclosure. Taking it out was much worse, the drive was stuck to the silicon and even though I was careful when removing it, the silicon film got mangled and ripped at one end.

I probably wouldn't moan about this so much if I hadn't just been using the Nexus enclosure. The Nexus Drive-A-Way feels more user friendly and well designed as you basically just have to drop in a drive, screw on the lid and plug it in. After the quality and ease of use of the Nexus the Silentmaxx was a let down, it feels like a much cheaper product when actually the Nexus is only about £5 more expensive in the UK.

But I suppose the important thing is how well it silences and cools the drive. You only have to assemble it once while you have to listen to the HDD every time you turn on your PC.

Reduction of idle whine is nowhere near as impressive as it was with the Nexus, it doesn't even compare well with my old SilentDrive. Inside the Nexus idle whine was very quiet, comparable to a low speed fan or modern low noise HDD like a Spinpoint. Considering the loud whine of my old hard disk that's a very substantial reduction and I was happy to leave it running constantly. In the Silentmaxx the noise is reduced to a certain extent, but is still much louder and more annoying than any component I'd consider using in my PC. I'm typing this with the IBM HDD running inside the Silentmaxx and it's really getting on my nerves. At the end of this sentence I'm going to have to turn off my PC and remove it.

Ahh, that's better! My PC is silent(ish) again.

Seek noise reduction was the one thing that disappointed me about the Nexus, but it isn't any better with the Silentmaxx. If anything I think it's slightly louder, not that much better than when the drive was running outside of any enclosure. Maybe I'm being unfair to the enclosure by not using the supplied rubber vibration reducers to mount it in a 5.25" bay, but as I don't have a free bay I'm testing the it on a pad of soft foam. I'd have thought that would reduce vibration as well as some firm feeling rubber blocks.

The one thing that the Silentmaxx does quite well is cool the drive, temperature stabalised at 39C, 7C less than when the drive was running in the Nexus enclosure. Maybe if your drive is already virtually silent this would be enough to remove that last little bit of audible noise while also reducing the heat. But purely as a drive silencer it's significantly inferior to the Nexus and my old SilentDrive too. IMO the 95% noise reduction stated by Silentmaxx is nonsense, I'd estimate that drive noise isn't even reduced by 25%.

Overall the Silentmaxx was a waste of money for me and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who wants maximum noise reduction. I might keep it for HDD cooling in a non-silent PC, such as a server running in a spare room, but I'm not going to use it in my planned PC build.

I was tempted to try a SilenX Luxurae as they're little more than half the price of the Nexus. But after reading about them here I think I'll try some home made HDD silencing methods and then pick up another Nexus enclosure if that doesn't work out.

[Edwood]

Stay away from SilentMaxx. They don't honor their warranties. Worst yet, I had a case where I even got an RMA from them, I shipped a defective PSU to them, and never heard from them since.

-Ed

[Stefan S.]

A few weeks ago I was looking for a Harddisk Silencer and Cooler and searched for some products. I found the Silentmaxx HDD-Silencer and thought it must be suitable for my purposes. I have a very silent pc. CPU and GPU are totally passively cooled. My Fans are ultra silent and i have a very silent seasonic Power Supply.

The only parts remaining and which producing noise are my 2 harddisks.

Therefore I had to reduce this noise somehow. After finding the silentmaxx hdd-silencer I was looking for some reviews. The first place I thought of was of course silentpcreview.com.

At the end I found this thread and was really disappointed, because the reviews where really bad and I already orderd the silentmaxx hdd-silencer. A few days later the silence(r) arrived and I thought damn... I will give it a try. After installing all the silicon and other parts, I placed my noisy seagate harddisk in the silentmaxx case, closed my pc and pressed the start button. I didn't expect much from the hdd-silencer.

But wait... Whoa! What a surprise! My noisy harddisk was quiet. I mean totally quiet! I didn't hear any noise from the disk. No zzzzzzzzzZZzzz, no krkrkrkkkkrrr, nothing!

I don't know what version was tested here, but the current version Silentmaxx HDD-Silencer Rev 2.0 is absolutely GREAT. It does not only reduce the noise significantely, it also cools the disk very good. I would highly recommend this product to everyone who ist looking for a silent pc and has a loud disk in his case!

I really don't know what Steve_Y and Edwood tested but here is a 9 pages long review of the Silentmaxx HD-Silencer Rev 2.0. They confirm that this silencer is a Kick Ass Product.

Silentmaxx Review on http://www.techniz.co.uk/modules.php?na ... 131&page=9