old quiet harddrives?

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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tyrian
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old quiet harddrives?

Post by tyrian » Tue Jan 28, 2003 2:42 am

This quite possibly could be a daft quesiton, but I was wondering if anyone knew of any older harddisks that made low noise output? Now that I've mostly suceeded at silencing my desktop system, I'm looking for things to quiet down the media machine (Heavily modified Dell GX1 Desktop style case system) which sits under the television for media playback, N64 emulation et cetera.

The most noticible noise at the moment is definitely the 5400rpm 4g hd. Is sandwitching the best option in this case? Also, anyone have any simple ideas for removing the two Voodoo5 fans? I'd love to just replace the heatsinks, but I'm a bit worried about the beast of a video card's heat dissipation.

mudboy
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Post by mudboy » Tue Jan 28, 2003 4:21 am

How about something like the Seagate U5 series? I have a 10GB in my daughter's system and it's pretty quiet.

Pete

Tore
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Post by Tore » Tue Jan 28, 2003 4:23 am

I have a 40GB 5400 RPM Fujitsu SilentDrive with liquid bearing. It makes a lot less noise than many old harddrives, but it also makes more noise than the 120 GB 7200 RPM Seagate Barracuda V.

It has much loader seek noises than the Barracuda. I think the idle noise is about the same, but I haven't tried to find out.

Red Dawn
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Post by Red Dawn » Tue Jan 28, 2003 10:45 am

Hi there tyrian,

I also have the voodoo 5 gfx card, and have also pondered about replacing the heatsinks, I was tempted to buy two alpha "for general use" heatsinks, but upon further inspection they did not fit. So I abandoned that idea a while ago. You could, however, most probably use a regular northbridge heatsink, and place them on the chips instead of the standard heatsinks, but it's a mild hassle to remove them. If you decide to do this, make sure the new heatsink will fit.

The fans are a bit easier, as they are only screwed against the fins on the heatsinks, so a simple screwdriver should do the trick there (I do it once and a while to clean the fans from dust). You could use a fan bracket of sorts, if you don't like making your own Zalman provides excellent fan brackets that you could use to have a fan blowing downwards on the heatsinks.

For me, I'm patiently awaiting my new components, and after that tuck away my little tbird beast where it won't bother me that much anymore.

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