Thank you so much to everyone who replied. I am reluctant to put the hard drives in another room because I do not have another computer, NAS, or enclosure to put them into. I had thought about doing suspension from the cd drive bays but I had the misconception that the hard drives would not fit but after looking at it again I think it might work well. I will have to tinker around and see if I will be able to mount both the drives within the CD bays or below, or if I will have to put one of the drives on a foam block at the bottom of the case.
@ehd - You had mentioned the danger of shorting the drives if they were placed on foam. How do I avoid this - do I just keep the moving parts of the hard drive away from the foam?
I looked up prices for SSDs and quiet laptop/desktop hard drives and the cheapest price for either was around $50, which is more than I would like to spend right now.
You are right about the Thermaltake PSU not being quiet - I had not thought about its noise output when I had bought it a few years ago as an upgrade to this computer. I have a Thermaltake PSU in another computer that I bought recently and it is probably the only part in the computer that makes a noticeable amount of noise. Unfortunately I had not known about this site when I had made those purchases.
The case is the one that comes with an emachine T5212. I know its quite an old computer, and manufacturer pre-built cases are the best for customization, but I am trying to minimize the amount of money that I invest into the system. The case fans I will be replacing soon with Enermax UC-8EBs (
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6811999199). It also has a geoforce 9600 and an intel pentium D 805 with a stock HS.
@Ralf Hutter - You had mentioned using sorbothane. What are the benefits of using that instead of something like packing foam. I looked on amazon and it was around $20 for a sheet - is it worth it to use sorbothane over foam I may have sitting at home.
Thank you again to everyone