[sdiy] All this cooling and noise stuff

[Mike]

On a similar tack, there was a paper on a Disc makers website, which showed
and interesting point about shock mounting hard discs. The noise went don,
but with teh softer mounts, the access time went up, due to overshoot of the
heads as the drive body moved in reaction to the rapid head movement. I had
to confront this one a long time ago on a big Avid sytem. In that case, part
of the answer was to enable the spindle sync on the SCSI drives, the
vibration isolation was done by mounting the cases, on resiliant mouints,
and adding 'Deadsheet' panels to the cases to kill the panel sounding board
effect and to add mass. I don't know what I'd do with some of teh latest 15K
RPM drives: they do sound like turbines!.
Getting to the point: if you're going to try killing some of the disc noise,
put the drive in one of those heatsink enclosure, and the resiliantly mount
that, but with a fairly stiff mount. Otherwise, big slow fans are a good
start, and a decent low noise power supply. Another thought is a secondary
case with filters, and remote fans for that case - again big slow fans, and
fit a temperature guage with a high temp warning in case you forget to
change the filters. A lot of extra noise comes from build upof dust on the
fan blades, or blocking the CPU heatsink allowing the fan to free wheel. If
you smoke, it gets a lot worse!.

HTH

||\/||ike