Noisy HDDs in 2015-era cases

[yummygizzards]

I have an Antec P180b from ~2008 that has two HGST 4 tb NAS drives in a mirror in the bottom hard drive position. These drives are 7200 rpm and I believe use five, 800 gb platters, and are loud. I can hear a "rustling" of the platters at about 4 feet with the case's front door closed, until they go into standby.

I might move this system to a more modern case designed for silence (eg Fractal Design Define series, Corsair Obsidian, etc). It seems most of these cases place the HDDs just behind the front panel. In general, are these premium cases sufficient to suppress noisy HDDs? The reviews mostly concern suppression of noise from GPUs (and the cases' ability to use water cooling) and fan noise. It seems to me that the best silent case in the world wouldn't matter if the components are inherently (too) noisy.

 

[kalston]

My Fractal R5 dampens the noise and vibrations of my HDDs nicely but they are very quiet drive to start with (1 TB single platter blue drives). And tbh I can still hear them when I run a defrag or similar. Short of a completely sealed case with horrible airflow I don't think you can do much better than that though.

 

[Lt Broccoli]

I have four of those 4 TB HGST NAS drives in a Define R4. I basically don't hear them, though my case is under the desk.

 

[yummygizzards]

Very interesting, thanks all for the perspectives. In the F4/F5, from what I can see, the entire front door, side panels, and vent covers are lined with foam. I could try to achieve the same in the P180 using adhesive noise dampening material like this stuff.

The HDD caddy in the R5 can also be moved to the bottom middle position, which might be a quieter place, although PSU cabling might get in the way.

Should've gone for the real deal, WD, and yes I know they're a subsidiary of Western Digital but nevertheless, WD is still better than any other brand. My 4 HDD are very quiet and fast. Save a buck or two? That's what happens.

Thanks for the advice. I wasn't aware that lower noise levels are considered premium, you-get-what-you-pay-for features in more expensive HDDs (vs URE, etc). Are datacenter HDDs made to be quiet?

 

[Impulse]

No, no one sits inside a data center all day except the poor sap whose turn it is to do some upgrades or fix something...

I wouldn't know much about the sonic difference between different HDD, been a while since I shopped for a HDD I'd access often... But there used to be a decent amount of leeway between models to some to extent.

In general you'll get two kinds of noise... Seek noise, not much you can do about that, specially on a fast drive or one with many platters, dampened cases (and even doors) help some but it'll still leak out unless you have crap for airflow as others said.

Vibration noise is far easier to deal with tho... Just decouple the darn thing. Rubber grommets on caddies and bays help but often it's not enough. Some people get fancy with bungee cord/webbing...

My ghetto solution for years on end has been a slab of foam on the bottom of the case... Lay the drive on it, maybe velcro it if you move the case a lot or just wanna be safe, it can't possibly transfer any vibrations to the case like that.

 

[yummygizzards]

No, no one sits inside a data center all day except the poor sap whose turn it is to do some upgrades or fix something...

I wouldn't know much about the sonic difference between different HDD, been a while since I shopped for a HDD I'd access often... But there used to be a decent amount of leeway for some to excel.

In general you'll get two kinds of noise... Seek noise, not much you can do about that, specially on a fast drive or one with many platters, dampened cases (and even doors) help some but it'll still leak out unless you have crap for airflow as others said.

Vibration noise is far easier to deal with tho... Just decouple the darn thing. Rubber grommets on caddies and bays help but often it's not enough. Some people get fancy with bungee cord/webbing...

My ghetto solution for years on end has been a slab of foam on the bottom of the case... Lay the drive on it, maybe velcro it if you move the case a lot or just wanna be safe, it can't possibly transfer any vibrations to the case like that.

point taken! The noise from these drives is probably seek noise, although it's not the higher pitched, intermittent, "clicking" that I'm used to from the heads moving around. It's more like an almost white noise that is just irregular enough (in volume and pitch) to be annoying. There's also a bit of a hum that is only perceptible when my ear is next to the drives.

 

[rive22]

I've put this in a lot of my older builds. Works great. Also get it with the 1/2" version for tight places. This combined with rubber grommets around fans and hard drives, makes all the difference.

http://www.amazon.com/Sonic-Barrier...8253&sr=8-3-fkmr0&keywords=sonic+barrier+foam

If you really want to get serious there are heavy versions of mass loaded vinyl you can use which are more expensive, than slap a layer of open cell acoustic foam on top of that.

 

[null]

Your mentions of silence, hdd noise, Fractal, and Corsair cases made me want to share my experience in all these areas.

I recently purchased the Corsair 330r and Fractal R5. Both are modern designs, marketed as silent cases, have sound dampening material, etc., etc. My goal was to revise my work station build to be silent, so I took my existing work station components and experimented with them in both cases, each for several days. The end result was realizing that component selection is far more important than case selection for silent builds. That's to say I believe any case merely supplements how quiet your components are, and alone is never sufficient to provide a silent build, or silence any 1 part of it.

Related to your scenario ... hard drives are the main source of noise in my work station too. That was true in my Thermaltake V3 and held true with the 330r and R5. I found hdd noise levels going from the Thermaltake to the latter 2 only marginally better, which is to say all 3 emit audible vibration noise. And, it was almost identical between the 330r and R5; the R5 suppresses hdd vibration slightly better.

So if you're trying to silence hdds, I personally wouldn't look to a case as the solution, even ones marketed as silent. Partly b/c I think you'll be disappointed in any case's ability to silence hdd noise (at least in stock form), and partly b/c other feature differences will prove more important (as I found w/the 330r vs R5).

The right way to reduce hdd noise is either by changing to quieter ones (ssd), suspending them, or moving to remote storage (NAS, etc.).

 

[Impulse]

Yeah, decoupling or suspension helps, but it gets tricky if you have a few drives and/or a case without the open/cage space to do it well... And the noise gets worse when it's several drives.

At that point you might as well start thinking about network storage unless you have some local storage need that just won't play nice over network speeds, can always split it and minimize the amount of local drives regardless.

 

[kalston]

Your mentions of silence, hdd noise, Fractal, and Corsair cases made me want to share my experience in all these areas.

I recently purchased the Corsair 330r and Fractal R5. Both are modern designs, marketed as silent cases, have sound dampening material, etc., etc. My goal was to revise my work station build to be silent, so I took my existing work station components and experimented with them in both cases, each for several days. The end result was realizing that component selection is far more important than case selection for silent builds. That's to say I believe any case merely supplements how quiet your components are, and alone is never sufficient to provide a silent build, or silence any 1 part of it.

Related to your scenario ... hard drives are the main source of noise in my work station too. That was true in my original Thermaltake V3 and held true with the 330r and R5. I found hdd noise levels going from the Thermaltake to the latter 2 only marginally better, which is to say all 3 emit audible vibration noise. And, it was almost identical between the 330r and R5; the R5 suppresses hdd vibration slightly better.

So if you're trying to silence hdds, I personally wouldn't look to a case as the solution, even ones marketed as silent. Partly b/c I think you'll be disappointed in any cases ability to silence hdd noise (at least in stock form), and partly b/c other feature differences will prove more important (as I found w/the 330r vs R5).

The right way to reduce hdd noise is either by changing to quieter ones (ssd), suspending them, or moving to remote storage (NAS, etc.).

I agree with you, selecting quiet internal components is the most important part. Heck my old case (Antec 902) had literally ZERO noise dampening and large grids and while it made more noise than my Fractal R5, it was only slightly more because all the internal components I use emit little to no noise (and I had replaced all the original fans with better, quieter ones).