Removable drive bays

[Ryan45]

I am looking for a quiet SATA removable drive bay. Anyone have any ideas?

[rei]

i think wiebetech is the only ones that make this and they are not inexpensive.

[feddup]

I was thinking of asking this same question but never got around to it. I presently have two non removable vantec vortex HD coolers in one of my PCs and believe them to be the source of most of my noise. A removable SATA drive bay would be an ultimate backup solution but I feared noise issues. Anyone's experiences with specific models would be great. newegg has many choices but buying randomly is asking for more noise.

[Ryan45]

Well I was at work today an I noticed we used these. We have 4 Raptors in them.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817123302

They are very nice looking, and perfect for hot swapping, but I cant tell how loud they are because they are in a sever and there are some loud fans in there.

[rei]

www.wiebetech.com

[Pgh]

I'm not 100% certain but I think the Wiebetech racks are rebadged Cremax Sohotank enclosures. They're probably a lot cheaper than the perpetually overpriced Wiebe stuff. Weibe targets Mac users so it's not all that surprising.

A Froogle search gives a lot of hits on creamax sohotank.

[Pgh]

I forgot to add that there are a lot of internal and external SATA racks here:

http://www.cooldrives.com/usb20cdrwdvd.html

and here:

http://www.satagear.com/index.cfm

[feddup]

Thanks to ryan45. Those athena at newegg enclosures look like they might be perfect. They're cheap enough to give a try at least.

[rei]

Ah, thanks for the enlightenment on Wiebetech. Their markup is quite high and it's been many a time that I've sighed at not being able to afford some of the harder-to-find Firewire gear that they list that I can't seem to find anywhere else.

[Pgh]

Ah, thanks for the enlightenment on Wiebetech. Their markup is quite high and it's been many a time that I've sighed at not being able to afford some of the harder-to-find Firewire gear that they list that I can't seem to find anywhere else.

Again, I'm not 100% certain, but I think Wiebe's entire product line is rebadged stuff from Asian manufacturers. The trick is finding out who - and if they distribute their stuff in the US (or wherever you're living). Cremax and SNT are likely candidates since they make a lot of different hard drive racks and enclosures that are rebadged by others.

[Ryan45]

Thanks to ryan45. Those athena at newegg enclosures look like they might be perfect. They're cheap enough to give a try at least.

Well I already ordered some so i'll let you know how they are when I get them.

[bomba]

Thanks to ryan45. Those athena at newegg enclosures look like they might be perfect. They're cheap enough to give a try at least.

Well I already ordered some so i'll let you know how they are when I get them.

I think you'll be pleased. I previously used a Kingwin mobile rack for PATA drives with a thin fan blowing onto the bottom of the drive. It was way loud! I recently bought two of these athena mobile racks from Newegg and although they use the same type of fan, they are pretty darn quiet. Instead of a key locking power switch, they have a conventional on-off button. I use the drive for backup and archiving, so in general, they are turned off. When spun-up this drive is by far the noisiest element in my PC, but it is not loud and the noise signature is quite smooth.
bomba

[coldmist]

Sorry if some of these questions are from a noob at this, but I have a few:

I'm thinking of building a computer around a PC-V1100B case, and thought about getting a Lian-Li SATA rack for backup.

Does anyone have any experience with the Lian-Li drive racks? How lowd are they? http://www.lian-li.com/Product/Mobile_Rack/SATA.htm

Are all SATA racks hot-swappable, like my external firewire/PATA enclosure now is, where you just do the "disconnect device" thing in Windows and then push the power button?

Can I leave the carrier in the bay, and just have it powered down, but not physically removed?

[bomba]

Are all SATA racks hot-swappable, like my external firewire/PATA enclosure now is, where you just do the "disconnect device" thing in Windows and then push the power button?

For WindowsXP, it's in device manager. Go to Start - Control Panel - System - Hardware - Device Manager; under disk drives, right click on the drive you want to power down and click on uninstall. When you power the drive back on it will be automatically recognized and installed. I've created a desktop shortcut to device manager. It's location in Windows XP is
C:\WINDOWS\system32\devmgmt.msc

Note that if Windows comes back and says a reboot is required, it's likely that your SATA controller does not support hot plug/hot swap. This was the case for me so I bought a pci Silicon Image SATA controller for which hot swapping works perfectly.

Can I leave the carrier in the bay, and just have it powered down, but not physically removed?

Sure

[inti]

The Athena is a rebadged Sunnytek SNT-125. It is made of plastic (choice of black or beige) and is available at some places in Europe for less than 10 euros (if you don't mind beige). I have one and despite the plastic it is a good quality product: it is well-engineered and the front handle mechanism works very well, with a lever action which presses the drive firmly into the SATA connectors when you close the handle. The drive tray is ventilated fom the bottom, and the base contains a very thin 80mm fan: it is quiet, but quieter still if you unplug the fan! As far as I know this is the only system with an 80mm fan, all the rest have an incredibly noisy 40mm fan which is to be avoided.

The SNT uses a 'native SATA to SATA' system - so the bare SATA drive goes into the tray and the enclosure contains SATA connectors at the correct position for the drive to plug directly into when the tray is in position. This also means that the rack is hot-swappable (assuming the drive and the controller support that).

Sunnytek also make a 2-bay, 3-drive aluminium system called SNT-2131 which is what I use now. It is also native SATA to SATA and it has the same lever/handle system as the SNT-125. It has an individual power button for each drive, which is nice. It has an 80mm fan on the rear of the unit which blows air onto the drives and is is very noisy (maybe the noisiest 80mm ever?) and certainly needs to be modded, I'll try to post a picture later. A fan with a tachometer has to be connected as the unit includes a fan failure detector. If modding the fan you need to watch the drive temperatures obviously: the unit does contain a thermal alarm (configurable for 55/60/65 degrees) but I don't know where it measures that from nor how reliable it is.

If you want spare trays for the SNT-2131 you have to buy another whole unit, alternatively the plastic tray from the SNT-125 fits into the SNT-2131 fairly well (in practice if using the plastic tray you have to push the tray home hard for a good SATA connection because the plastic tray is about 1mm shorter than the aluminium tray).

Unfortunately with the aluminium tray I'm getting a lot of vibration noise transmitted to the case (a fairly deep thrumming noise). I tried suspending the whole enclosure but that didn't help much. So instead I tried grommets on each drive - thin rubber washers between the drive and the aluminium base of the tray. The problem is the tolerances in the whole system are very fine - there is less than 1mm clearance between drives, and using even the thinnest rubber washers means that the drives snag each other when you slide them in and out if you are using all three bays. (I tried bending down the aluminium tabs which hold the drive mounting screws to counteract the increased height due to the washers, but that just made it snag the drive below instead)

I'm now thinking of 're-engineering' a tray so that it uses a suspension system instead of bottom mounting the drive - it would have to be a very good job in view of the clearance issues mentioned above. Has anybody tried this?

[inti]

An update: I've not found a solution to vibration transmission when using an aluminium mobile rack - it is basically as bad as hard-mounting a HDD, perhaps even worse because there is a slight play in the system and so you hear the HDD rack vibrating against the enclosure or against other HDD in the same enclosure.

I was not able to suspend 3 drives in this rack as it is basically impossible to suspend drives to sub-1mm precision, also most types of elastic are too thick.

Alternative solutions:
1) Set the drives to spin down when not in use, and live with the noise when they are spinning - try to choose low-vibration drives (I like Maxtor myself but YMMV).
2) Use the enclosure with bare drives, which plug directly into the SATA plugs, and place the bare drives on 1.5mm rubber pads for some isolation. That is about the best that can be achieved.

[gb115b]

Ryan,

where are you based? i'm selling some 3 bay (takes up 2*5.25) SATA hotswap ready enclosures which i modded to take a quiet fan (which you could plus into a fanmate to control the speed...

they're not exactly silent though.

i just migrated to a new steel server case by chenbro - sr107

this has 8 hotswap drives in it, which are cooled by 120mm fans (which i swapped for papst ones)

my drives run to mid 40s which ain't great, but the fan noise is pretty low with the papst / asus qfan type setup.

also as it's all steel it seems to keep the vibration noise down...

those aluminium ones can be terrible sometimes.

[cycleback]

I also need to connect some additional ATA drives to my system in a ANTEC 3000B and have been looking at systems that mount 3 or 4 hard drives in 3 * 5.25 bays. Some of the items I have looked at include:

Cooler Master 4 in 3 (120 mm fan)
Scythe Kama Bay Fan with 3 3.5 to 5.25 converters
ThermalTake iCage
Lian-Li EX-34B
iStar RHC 120 mm fan with 3 3.5 to 5.25 converters

My main priorities are disk cooling and quietness.

1) Does anyone have experience with the above products or can recommend something else?

2) Can any of these be mounted properly with ANTECs drive rails?

[mgiammarco]

Any news about putting a fan AND some hdd with 3.5 to 5.25 (rubber ) adapter?
I am interested, but I am not sure that there is enough space or holes.

Thanks in advance for any reply.