Hard drive silencing?

KiiYzOo · 5 Feb 2011 at 22:35

They'll probably have some sort of passive heatsink

John24 · 6 Feb 2011 at 14:03

Well yeah the whole thing acts as a heat sink, are the tiny holes just for cooling though or is running them in a sealed unit going to cause problems.

I would think not because they wouldn't be selling these enclosures otherwise, but there is a warning on hard drives not to block any drive holes, put them in a sealed enclosure and their effectively blocked.

Speed · 6 Feb 2011 at 14:05

I think if you totally sealed them air tight with something like blu-tac then you might run into problems. But as long as air can get into them, I expect it is fine, hence why they work fine in enclosures.

koolpc · 6 Feb 2011 at 14:07

Try suspending your HD with sewing elastic. Works a treat

Tikkabhuna · 6 Feb 2011 at 14:22

John24 said:
Well yeah the whole thing acts as a heat sink, are the tiny holes just for cooling though or is running them in a sealed unit going to cause problems.

I would think not because they wouldn't be selling these enclosures otherwise, but there is a warning on hard drives not to block any drive holes, put them in a sealed enclosure and their effectively blocked.

I think its to stop air pressure building as it heats up. The holes seem far too small to be used to cool it.

John24 · 6 Feb 2011 at 15:01

Tikkabhuna said:
I think its to stop air pressure building as it heats up.

That sounds logical. It wouldn't be a good idea to run it in a sealed enclosure then, unless the extra air inside the enclosure is enough to stop the pressure rising too much.

Speed · 6 Feb 2011 at 16:26

John24 said:
That sounds logical. It wouldn't be a good idea to run it in a sealed enclosure then, unless the extra air inside the enclosure is enough to stop the pressure rising too much.

I expect the enclosure manufacturers know this, I very much doubt they are built air-tight as there would be no advantage. Never heard of any standard hard drives failing due to this, only high performance versions due to heat build-up.

John24 · 6 Feb 2011 at 17:02

Speed said:
I expect the enclosure manufacturers know this

Yeah that's what I said earlyer

Speed said:
I very much doubt they are built air-tight as there would be no advantage.

I have to disagree with that though.

Hopefully there will be enough left in my budget to get one of these and try it out. Would be much easyer to have high capacity SSD's at an affordable price, one day maybe, one day.

Speed · 6 Feb 2011 at 17:38

John24 said:
I have to disagree with that though.

In what way? What advantage would be had by making it air tight? Sure it might help with noise levels but honestly using noise reducing foam would be just as effective and wouldn't potientially kill a drive due to the heat build-up. I guess it depends on the construction of the enclosure and what it is designed for.

Still, the most cost effective way has been previously mentioned and doesn't really require an enclosure, just bungie or elastic.

John24 · 7 Feb 2011 at 01:05

Simply that it would be, although admittedly probably only slightly if comparing to a good non-sealed enclosure.

Suspending the drive is cheap and very effective, but it doesn't help with platter noise or motor whine. And in my case required an extra fan to cool the drive because the higher temp of it was heating up the rest of my case.

Speed · 7 Feb 2011 at 01:07

What sort of drive required you to cool it directly with a fan! :confused:

Pretty much all modern 7200RPM drives run very cool.

KelDG · 7 Feb 2011 at 16:47

Try some of these

But seriously, I have a mega old 500gb 4 platter HD that has some seriously loud seek movements, a proper grinder. Did the elastic thing and its next to silent now.

slim01 · 7 Feb 2011 at 19:58

a hdd heating up a case? never heard of that before, what hdds are those?

slim01 · 7 Feb 2011 at 19:59

KelDG said:
Try some of these

But seriously, I have a mega old 500gb 4 platter HD that has some seriously loud seek movements, a proper grinder. Did the elastic thing and its next to silent now.

LMAO!!!

headphones are great when you wanna play crysis at 3am without shaing the neighbors house down though

John24 · 7 Feb 2011 at 21:20

I'm supprised that you find it a supprising for a HDD to heat up a case! It's a ~30-40C heat source.

In my situation, before I suspended it the HD was infornt of the intake vent and sat at about 34C with CPU idle temps of around 35.

After moving the drive to the 3.5" bay it wasn't getting cooled by the intake and it's temp was about 42C. The possition of it in the case put it right infront of the HS fan intake so CPU Idle temps went up to about the same as the HDD.

So I suspended a 92mm fan in the spare 3.5" bay bellow the suspended HDD and that knocked it's temps down to about 36C and in turn CPU Idle temps went down to about the same, but still slightly higher than before.

I suppose it depends on your setup what results you get rather than the type of drive, mine was a WD 640GB. Not the hottest HDD I own but still enough of a heat source to effect my system temps when sat infront of the HS.

Silenceing HDD platter noise can only be done with an enclosure, unless you have a highly soundproofed case, or you just stick your drives in a NAS in another room. The latter might actually work out cheaper with the price of some of these enclosures, especially if you need more than one.

I'd like to see you try sleeping in those ear defenders