IT Bytes

I’ve spent a fair bit of time trying to stop my PC sounding noisy. I could feel that the hard disks were vibrating and that was probably the cause. The disks had been pretty close to silent (through carefull buying) but for some reason that were now noisy. So I bought the Nexus DiskTwin hard disk cooler and vibration dampner. Is a pretty standard fair where you install your 3.5 disk into the 5.25 bay but with a large chunk of rubber and metal heat sink to make up the difference. But which out of my 3 disks should get the 5.25 treatment? I took the power out of all the disks and put the back trying out all the permutations. Odd thing was that when 2 of the 3 disks were installed is was pretty quiet, with all 3 the vibration came back. So I can only assume that the combination of disks is just enough to catch some sort of re-inforced feedback and cause the vibration. So I decided that I should keep the two Seagates together since they use the same hardware and hopefully would create the same frequency of noise and isolate the Samsung. Installing the Nexus was easy enough but it was wan’t without an annoying problem. My case uses runners to easily fit disks but the screw positions are not flush to the end of the drive like you’d expect from a 5.25 drive. Consequently the disk won’t fit into the rail guides and therefore I was forced to remove 2 drive bays to make room for the one disk. Was it worth it? Well the horrible vibration has died down a bit, and is close to silent with one of the drives goes to sleep so overall it was worth it to reduce the noise even if it hasn’t cured it. But at least I’ve got a good idea what I need to do now…get rid of one of the drives!