DIY hard drive sound reduction with pictures

[Mark Grant]

Here is a simple way to reduce the noise from a hard drive, when used in a desktop case.

Two pieces of foam are simply wrapped around the drive and secured with tie wraps.

A hard drive sounds noisy because the case resonates with the head movement etc.

So decoupling the drive from the case makes things much more peaceful.

If you choose a drive that is already fairly quiet, then mounting like this makes it really quiet.

An earth wire is attached, because if the drive was screwed to the case it would be earthed.

The drive simply sits on the bottom of the desktop case under the DVD drive.

If you get the amount of foam just right, the drive is a fairly tight fit in the case.

You could attach a PAPST 12 db fan to the drive if you are concerened about heat.




Foam attached to the drive.

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Side view, air gap underneath and Earth wire.

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Acoustic cushioning close up

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Happy tweaking,

Mark G.

[alanrob]

That would scare the hell out of me m8
HD's run very warm so wouldn't this foam start to melt with the heat?

How long have you had the drive running like this?

[Mark Grant]

Hello Alan,

A hard drive has a max temp of about 55 Centigrade.

Not sure what melting point of foam is, but will be more than that.

Been running since about christmas like that, no problems so far.

I will attach a thermistor under the foam, touching the metal of the drive, just to see what sort of temperature the drive runs at when on all day.

Will post more later today.

Mark.

[alanrob]

It'll be interesting to see what the temp difference is with and without the foam. Looking forward to your results.

Now, where did I put that foam

[Mark Grant]

The PC has been running for 10 hours now.

The surface temperature of the hard drive is 44.5 degrees C, with a room temperature of 21 degrees C.

So no problem with heat

The hard drive is an IBM 5400 rpm, nothing special.


The PC spec is a P3 933 slot 1 with a quiet PC Molex cooler, the standard PSU has a PAPST fan fitted, a bit slower than a standard fan, but fairly quiet.

No other fans in the case, airflow is a bit limited, so could be cooler.

Must get some of the PAPST 12 db fans sometime.

The case is lined with Brown bread, a product similar to Dynamat, but costs less. This makes the case really heavy and dead sounding, unlike the usual tin can PC case sound.

link to a site selling brown bread. One roll is more enough for a desktop PC case.

Someone else going to try this?

Good luck,

Mark.