Mounting A Hdd

Since Sprocket has moved into her new Gateway case, and especially since I have returned to watercooling, the loudest ( and most irritating) noise escaping from the case has been the whine of the harddrive.
Had I been a smart person I would have bought a Seagate last year and this may not have been a problem, but nooooo, I was seduced by rebates and bought a WD.
Works fine, but noisier than I would like.

I have been pondering a method to decouple the drive from it's mounting frame, hopefully reducing this noise, and came up with several methods...all increasingly complex.

Last night a new, far simpler method occured to me and this morning I assembled the prototype/proof of concept.
http://img26.photobucket.com/albums/...ocker/HDD2.jpg
http://img26.photobucket.com/albums/...ocker/HDD1.jpg
Using four rubber isolating feet, four nylon wire clamps and two rods, the drive should be totally isolated from the main case structure.
The drive is laying on it's back for the photos, it's installed position is 180 degrees rotated, standing on the feet, not suspended.

I used the rather large diameter rods (5/8") simply because they were around, smaller would probably work just as well.
To mount this, all I need is two holes in the front casewall, could hardly be simpler.

I shall install the unit at the same time I redo my waterloop ( adding the northbridge waterblock), probably later this afternoon, and I'll post pics of the complete setup and results.

Just thought I'd offer this as proof that the proverbial cat can be skinned several ways....

oh dammm nice clocker :o

my maxtor is really loud as well <_<
tell us if it works..
keep it up
cant wait :rolleyes: B)

OK.
It works&#33;

The installed configuration is different than the original pics, but I used the same parts and concept.
There were some things in the way on the front case wall (activity lights, mainly) that would have pushed the top of the drive right up to the bottom of the upper bays.
Not good for airflow.
But it all worked out for the best after all.
I simply moved the rubber feet to the holes in the side of the HDD...now the support rails are cradling the drive rather than holding it up.
The drive whine has completely disappeared.
I can still detect the seek noises, but they seem diminished...that might be just wishful thinking, I hope not.

Looking at the final installation it occurs to me that this would also be an excellent method of mounting the optical drives.
If I were building a case from scratch ( a project that I consider often), I would certainly try this method first.
It&#39;s extremely easy, cheap, effective in silencing vibration and the drives would be infinitely adjustable fore and aft.

I took some pics of the project before I buttoned Sprocket up, I just need to load them to my PC and post them.
As soon as I&#39;m sure that all is well I&#39;ll do that.

u coulda tried suspending it with tye-rips....... works fine for keepin da noise down ;)

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Originally posted by Storm@26 June 2004 - 15:09
u coulda tried suspending it with tye-rips....... works fine for keepin da noise down ;)

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Indeed, I&#39;m sure it does.

A bit too ah...temporary looking for my taste though.
The goal with this conversion ( and in fact, all my mods) is that it not appear homemade.
They must be at least as good, if not better, than factory work.

Ideally, a stranger would look at the case and think Gateway made it all.

clocker thats a pretty nice idea. i have a WD and it only makes noise when i defrag and stuff like that its quiet most of the time. i had a maxtor before this 1 and jesus christ that thing made so much noise i wanted to destroy my comp :lol: . and also where did you get the matierials to do that?

The rubber isolation feet came with my Zalman heatpipe HDD cooler ( but I&#39;ve seen then available separately other places).

The plastic wire clamps came from Ace Hardware.
The aluminum was just some bar stocK I had laying around...a few minutes in the lathe and they were drilled/tapped and cut to length.
That might be the only tough part for most folks, but I can think of several alternatives that would be doable from standard hardware store stuff.

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Originally posted by mofos@26 June 2004 - 17:22
i had a maxtor before this 1 and jesus christ that thing made so much noise i wanted to destroy my comp

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Then you don&#39;t wanna meet my old computer&#39;s Quantum Bigfoot, 3200rpm, 8gb hard drive...loudest POS ever. the seek noises can be heard from houses away, and the spinning of that cheap little 3200rpm motor are louder than a harley :o

:lol: It is loud.

My local shop has a HDD from some Stone Age computer that I really want bad.

It&#39;s about 15"x8"x8" and prolly weighs in at over 15lbs.
Has a clear plexi top, secured with springclips and an external belt drive motor.
I swear, it looks like a sewing machine motor with the rubber drive belt from a vacuum cleaner.

The disks are the size of Buick hubcaps.

They have no idea what it&#39;s from, and almost certainly it doesn&#39;t work ( the platters spin fine though).

If nothing else, it could slice a loaf of bread in milliseconds....

Quote:

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Originally posted by clocker@26 June 2004 - 22:21
My local shop has a HDD from some Stone Age computer that I really want bad.

It&#39;s about 15"x8"x8" and prolly weighs in at over 15lbs.
Has a clear plexi top, secured with springclips and an external belt drive motor.
I swear, it looks like a sewing machine motor with the rubber drive belt from a vacuum cleaner.

The disks are the size of Buick hubcaps.

They have no idea what it&#39;s from, and almost certainly it doesn&#39;t work ( the platters spin fine though).

If nothing else, it could slice a loaf of bread in milliseconds....

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:lol:

forgot to mention, that quantum bigfoot is named bigfoot because teh drive is 5.25" (width of a cdrom drive) :lol: hence making it a very very slow drive...

That explains the "bigfoot" part of the name.
How about "quantum"?

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Originally posted by clocker@26 June 2004 - 22:26
That explains the "bigfoot" part of the name.
How about "quantum"?

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That was teh company, Quantum. They now only handle backup hard drives and stuff for networks, and handed all of their PC harddrive stuff down to Maxtor.

Another reason why i hate Maxtor (Quantum was a very very crappy harddrive company...)

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Originally posted by ROSSCO_2004@27 June 2004 - 03:30
Quantum was a very very crappy harddrive company...

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I&#39;d have to disagree with that.

Quantum used to be just about the best IDE drive maker, they almost never failed.
But as capacities grew they just didn&#39;t do the R&D to keep up, so they brought out the Bigfoot to increase capacity while still using the same technology, and it was much bigger than the competition at the time. But of course it couldn&#39;t last.

After that, I&#39;d say your comments are probably about right though.

Quote:

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Originally posted by lynx+26 June 2004 - 22:59--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (lynx @ 26 June 2004 - 22:59)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-ROSSCO_2004@27 June 2004 - 03:30
Quantum was a very very crappy harddrive company...

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I&#39;d have to disagree with that.

Quantum used to be just about the best IDE drive maker, they almost never failed.
But as capacities grew they just didn&#39;t do the R&D to keep up, so they brought out the Bigfoot to increase capacity while still using the same technology, and it was much bigger than the competition at the time. But of course it couldn&#39;t last.

After that, I&#39;d say your comments are probably about right though. [/b][/quote]
From what my friend experience (like 3 or 4 drive replacements in one year, probably just a really bad model or something, think it was like a 15gb or something? :unsure: ) plus my crappy drive as well, what am i supposed to think? ;)

Obviously i find that they are teh worst harddrive maker ever :lol: Maxtor not far behind...

I&#39;ve got a Quantum Fireball that is quite a good little drive actually. I was very surprised with it&#39;s speed, it&#39;s rated at 5400rpm but it&#39;s pretty fast, it&#39;s also 30gb

I was at my friend&#39;s house today.
Recently his computer went all messed, constant freezing for no reason (no bsod&#39;s or anything) (windows xp and windows me and windows 98 all froze). Tried reinstalling so many times. Nothing worked.

Finally, he opened up the computer one day to clean it to see if that would help. He left it open a few days while he used it, then one day he said he saw this big orange dot on teh hard drive. Glowing. The drive had caught on fire. lol. Wrecked both his hard drives (a 6gb and a 10gb, no big loss) and his motherboard, ram, and cpu. rest was fine.

A computer store guy replaced his motherboard and cpu and ram for him for 40bucks. he put in 256mb, an asus motherboard, and a pentium 3 733mhz (better than teh 633mhz celeron from before). After that he used a 3gb drive for about 3 days, then bought a 40gb western digital.

Till today i didn&#39;t see it, but i was over, and that drive is SILENT&#33; you don&#39;t hear the clicking from searching at all. it is so quiet.

Ofcourse he has spyware galore on that computer, so it is slow srating up. But if not for programs not opening slow at startup, you wouldn&#39;t have even known the computer was still trying to boot. ;)

edit: Did i mention that the drive that caught on fire was a Quantum Bigfoot? <_<

I was talking about the original Bigfoot, which I believe came out in 1997, and had a max size of 6.4GB. It wasn&#39;t too long before the disk drive division was sold to Maxtor, although Quantum may have brought out a higher capacity drive before that happened. The later drives just couldn&#39;t match the performance of the competition, which may be what led to their downfall.

A friend bought a Bigfoot just after they were released, and it is still going strong to this day.

Edit: The biggest Bigfoot 2.5GB, the Bigfoot CY was up to 6.4GB, than came the Bigfoot TX at up to 12GB and the TS at up to 19.2BGB. It was probably the bigger drives which were crap.