Effectiveness of soft-mounting optical drives?

warriorpoet · Post by **warriorpoet** » Tue Dec 23, 2008 12:26 pm

I'm in the final stages of considering/ designing a custom case build. One of the last things I'd like to clear up before I go forward is this: is it possible to soft-mount an optical drive without degrading performance?

Does anyone have experience with this?

If worse comes to worse I can always soft-mount the whole rack, but I think it'd be fun to try double-soft mounting the noisy beasts (once at the primary connection, once at the rack connection) to see if I can keep 'em quiet

Thanks!

LodeHacker · Post by **LodeHacker** » Thu Dec 25, 2008 3:04 am

Why soft mount an optical drive? A CD/DVD drive is never going to be in continuous use, so softmounting one is totally useless. Any optical drive will not vibrate much, the horrible sound comes from the ultra fast disc spinning. You will not do any good if you softmount a CD/DVD drive. Just hardmount it

AuraAllan · Post by **AuraAllan** » Thu Dec 25, 2008 3:21 am

Softmounting an ODD will result in a whole lot of reading-/writing-errors I belive.

Also as mentioned. The noise comes from the disc spinning.

warriorpoet · Post by **warriorpoet** » Thu Dec 25, 2008 3:51 pm

'k.

Then anyone have experience with placing the loud buggers in boxes of foam, or does most of the noise come from the front (in which case I'll have towork out a way to stealth it behind some acoustipak).

jhhoffma · Post by **jhhoffma** » Fri Dec 26, 2008 10:12 am

Most of the noise comes from the vibrations being transmitted from the sides and bottom of the drive casing to the drive cage mounts (and the rest of the case as an extension). Some dampening material (soft foam or silicone/rubber grommets) in between those joints should do a lot to reduce the amount of vibration being transmitted.

ACook · Post by **ACook** » Fri Dec 26, 2008 4:35 pm

slowing down the drive to 8x or lower (dvd) should eliminate most if not all of the noise.

what do you plan to use the drive with that would create such a terrible noise?

warriorpoet · Post by **warriorpoet** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 6:25 am

jhhoffma wrote:Most of the noise comes from the vibrations being transmitted from the sides and bottom of the drive casing to the drive cage mounts (and the rest of the case as an extension). Some dampening material (soft foam or silicone/rubber grommets) in between those joints should do a lot to reduce the amount of vibration being transmitted.

I'll have to give that a shot. p180 uses rails, so that gives me a touch more room.

warriorpoet · Post by **warriorpoet** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 6:26 am

ACook wrote:slowing down the drive to 8x or lower (dvd) should eliminate most if not all of the noise.

what do you plan to use the drive with that would create such a terrible noise?

When the rest of the system (save HDDs-- which will be addressed shortly with a pair of 2.5" drives) is essentially silent, the HUGE windup noise from my optical drives is a nasty thing.