Western Digital Resonating

celliott · 2 Sep 2008 at 20:45

After seeing the issues some Seagate drives used to have i.e. noisy motors from a particular factory, I have stuck with WD since.

Got 2x drives for a RAID configuration. One has glue on the underside of the motor, and is whisper quiet. The second one uses a ribbon cable to connect the motor, and it resonates quite noticably. So I bought another elsewhere, and again it resonates and was made in the same factory..

Anyone have any cool ideas for getting rid of this irritating resonating.... 1..2..hummm...1...2...humm It's doing my head in.

The drive is already mounted on silicone grommets, I'm not really keen on the idea of suspending it via elastic though.

PhillyDee · 2 Sep 2008 at 23:18

Then apart from a silent enclosure theres nothing else. I would definately Bungee Mod it. I did it with my rapto, and its pretty solid tbh.

SillyHeatsink · 3 Sep 2008 at 16:31

Since you've went out of your way to call the motion 'resonance' (as opposed to plain old vibration), I'm assuming you know what this is and have ascertained that it is indeed resonating.

Your best bet is to change the mass of the resonating component - glue on a weight with a hot glue gun (reason being hot glue is easy to remove, RMA won't accept a drive with a ball bearing super glued to it). If that doesn't work, try damping out the motion - affix something large and heavy to the entire drive, like a metal plate.

G'luck.

totoro · 4 Sep 2008 at 18:33

blue tack

failing that, a good whack.

wonko · 6 Sep 2008 at 10:01

What you describe sounds more like a 'beat frequency'. Does it only happen when both drives are spinning? If so, it's the addition of the idle noise put out by each disk - if the frequency of the noise of one is fractionally higher than the other then you get the 1..2..hum..1..2..hum. It's not likely solved by adding mass to the drives. I've had this a few years ago, and it's a pain. I solved it by retiring the culprit to being a backup disk.