Hard Disk´s Bearings Spin noise killer & HD Cooler . . Y e s -sss .. Story & How to ...

Since lately I have become too sensitive for computer noise after succesfully silencing all other noisy stuff of my machine (read Fans!), the last thing to fix properly was the hard disk spinning noise, since I have already had it mounted & dampened a bit with tiny foam washers under screws; it helped for low frequency vibrations & when HD heads were writing data on it for a bit. Did not bother me the louder starting & stopping whine of it, but the constant irritating presence of high pitched but not loud bearings spinning noise I could hear out of the box spending quite a lot of time in front of it, even if I have some sound dampening stuff inside my case mounted. It was irritating me less when the drive was new & would be bothering me less if I would have an ordinary tower case under my desk, but since this is not a case & the drive became noisy, even if having liquid bearings, right after the warranty period was over (interesting that according to "Murpy´s law" it happens exactly 2 months, 2 weeks & 2 days after the warranty expires for most modern equipment ! ). After few months thinking about this, I had to do something, especially if I wanna get in the future a 10kRPM WD Raptor hard disk.

Compressed textile panels few mm thick like felt (half synthetic & half natural recycled fibers), which is used for textile floor coverings, is IMHO one of the best materials for sound dampening regarding price/performance ratio, it is hard and rigid enough & also is not so hard to cut it with super-cutter (Olfa knife ) & glue it together to make some kind of a "cage" or small box. Since I had some residues of it from times I was making my ex-bass sound reinforcement boxes used for outer cover of them, I took it from the box in my attic & used it. It was of grey color ... but can be bought a variety of colors ... It looks like this, it is a 5-6 mm thick stuff on the right slide ...
		Left slides: this material is easy to glue together with an ordinary wood type glue (milk or yoghurt look a like, polyvinyl-acetate I think ), when it dryes after min. half a day, becomes hard like soft plastic & transparent too, but has to be applied twice on both of this material edges that need to be joined together with a pause of at least few minutes between first and 2nd applying, because the textile sucks the first layer of glue into itself ...

Right slides: before the material sucks glue in, you put the pieces together & fix them with Dress Maker Straight Pins; when you are sure that everything is in a place, you can push those pins into material till their heads & a bit even more. Than you just wait better almost a day for glue to dry & harden before removing pins. The pieces are than firmly tighten together, but still a bit flexible; if on some place are not glued well together, you can lately still use some momentary fast super-glue to repair the gaps.
. . .Yes, so you can additionally glue

practically a first hardened glue layer with another glue together, funny that but effective, if needed any kind of repairing the previous glueing !

Since the idea of the silencing & cooling enclosure I had it in my mind & not on paper (plan), I had to first measure the HD dimensions & think about the free space all around it for additional forced cooling (now recommended since than HD will be almost closed in a quite small space), but also about free space in my machine, not to have problems mounting altogether inside it! Than I wrote down a note on paper for dimensions of all parts for sides for this box, made marks for edges/corners on the material layed on a desk & started with cutting pieces directly (w/o any complete drawings ). There were two big parts for covers, 3 + 2 medium parts for side covers/holders & two small one covers + 2 "micro" additional ones. [later added also some other smaller cut parts, see end of article]

. . . dimensions were approx.: - (2) x 10x15,5 (16) cm - 2 x 15,5x6 cm - 3 x 11x6cm - 2 x 1,5x10cm + 2x 1,5x0,5cm		As you can see, on the second biggest piece on bottom left I already cut also a bit smaller square hole than the cooling fan dimensions are, so that it can be firmly fixed there_in w/o any screws ...

 

© Zdenko Jerman-Spajky