I just read an article over at Lifehacker that was called Silence Your Hard Drive with Elastic Suspenders and I thought I weigh in my 2 cents on the topic because I had tried lots of methods to silence the hard drives in my PC. The first thing that people have to understand is that there are two types of noises that hard drives make. The first is their running noise and the second the noise that their vibration is causing.
The article explained how to take care of the vibration but it did not tell that you would still hear the hard drive if it was noisy when reading, writing or seeking. The easiest way to take care of vibrations without paying money at all is to use some foam rubber that is placed beneath the hard drive. I'm using this technique for years with great success. This does not take care of the normal noises of the hard drive though.
The only thing that is really helping here is to either buy hard drives that have very low running noises or silence the hard drive, meaning putting it into a noise reduction case or the complete PC tower. If you do that you need to take care of a problem that is arising: heat. If you put the hard drive in a case that is reducing noises you will notice that it will run at a higher temperature which can lead to data loss and errors over time.
This means that if you silence the hard drive or the PC tower you need to make sure that everything is staying cool inside. Here is what I did. I first bought a hard drive that was making a high pitching sound whenever it was running. This was not endurable at all and I decided to trade it in for a almost silent hard drive which was causing vibration in my PC case. I placed the hard drive on the rubber foam which got rid of that problem.
That's one reason why I really like the Flash SSD drives. They don't produce such noises. It will take some time before they become affordable enough but it will be a great relief for everyone who likes silent PCs.
Silencing your hard drives
The article explained how to take care of the vibration but it did not tell that you would still hear the hard drive if it was noisy when reading, writing or seeking. The easiest way to take care of vibrations without paying money at all is to use some foam rubber that is placed beneath the hard drive. I'm using this technique for years with great success. This does not take care of the normal noises of the hard drive though.
The only thing that is really helping here is to either buy hard drives that have very low running noises or silence the hard drive, meaning putting it into a noise reduction case or the complete PC tower. If you do that you need to take care of a problem that is arising: heat. If you put the hard drive in a case that is reducing noises you will notice that it will run at a higher temperature which can lead to data loss and errors over time.
This means that if you silence the hard drive or the PC tower you need to make sure that everything is staying cool inside. Here is what I did. I first bought a hard drive that was making a high pitching sound whenever it was running. This was not endurable at all and I decided to trade it in for a almost silent hard drive which was causing vibration in my PC case. I placed the hard drive on the rubber foam which got rid of that problem.
That's one reason why I really like the Flash SSD drives. They don't produce such noises. It will take some time before they become affordable enough but it will be a great relief for everyone who likes silent PCs.
Silencing your hard drives
