Fans causing noise due to being blocked by harddrives...

[Streeteh]

Helloes,

I recently bought two noctua fans to whack in my case (getting rather anal about noise but also want good cooling). Now, they've made overall temps shoot down in comparison to the rubbish fans i previously had, however as they push air much better it's causing a rather audible noise as it hits my 3 harddrives. Turning on q-fan actually makes the issue worse for some reason as the rushing noise becomes a sort of pulsing hum.

My case is an antec 300 and at present the harddrive layout is:

Empty Bay
Empty Bay <-- Fan centre
Empty Bay
Drive
Drive <-- Fan centre
Drive


I figure my best bet is to 'spread out' the harddrives, where would be the best place to try and aim to place them, in the center of the fans or at their edges? I assume the edge is the best bet so i'm going to try and arrange them like this:

Drive
Empty Bay <-- Fan centre
Empty Bay
Drive
Empty Bay <-- Fan centre
Drive

Bit of a random question i know, but i really want to try and avoid 'trial and error' as unplugging all the drives, cutting the binding for the cables, replacing and rebinding will be an awful lot of effort. Any ideas guys?

 

[Soundood]

the solution you provided, should do the trick,

Drive
Empty Bay <-- Fan centre
Empty Bay
Drive
Empty Bay <-- Fan centre
Drive
and also you might want to consider a fan controller, that way you can dim the air flow, and thus remove some noise, have it this way in low power mode, and crank it up for gaming etc

 

[BarKeep]

Turning on q-fan actually makes the issue worse for some reason as the rushing noise becomes a sort of pulsing hum.

The noise you describe may be due to the 'beating' effect of having 2 fans running at around but exactly the same speed. If your Noctura's came with resistive cables, try fitting one to one of the fans.

 

[Streeteh]

Awesome, cheers guys. Using your advice i set the harddrives in the positions i stated in the op, which was still loud, but used the resistance cable on the lower fan to reduce the noise to near silent. The upside is temps have still dropped significantly. So, huzzah!

OcUK forum goers once again proving their might.