Use a modern SATA drive?

Loud and proud is kind-of the nature of the beast. I doubt there's much you can do beyond physically isolating the drive from your ears.

Well... The sound from the motor is of course nothing that I can do anything about. I was more, as I asked, interested in the vibrations of the drive. A bit like what shock absorbers (to use a car analogy) do I have to look for? The same about the heat that I asked about. What cooling solutions have people used, as drives like IBM 10k 9.4gb drives, give out a lot of heat.

I mean... you gotta kind of work in their universe, not the other way around. Typically, with a 10kRPM SCSI drive, you fight the heat with big loud fans. Noise is dealt with more or less the same way as with children: Place them in an isolated room and shut the door. The point is performance -- nothing about the whole contraption is meant to be pleasant. 😁

Outside of servers, I've used a sum total of ONE SCSI hard drive in a workstation, when I wanted blistering performance for editing audio. It was a 7200 RPM Ultra 160 drive and it was definitely louder than my PATA drives at the time. I used thermal adhesive to epoxy a small chipset heatsink onto one of the hottest ICs on its controller board, and placed it right in front of the main system intake fan. I ran that for a while before moving to PATA RAID, and eventually SATA. I didn't miss anything about it. Not the cost, not the noise, not the long boot-up times, and for sure not the cabling hassles.

Motor & recalibration noise aside, I normally avoid 10K drives in retro builds and try to stick with 7.2K Fujitsu-branded ones which I've found to be as quiet as any. For vibration I try and mount the drives in 5.25 bays using either the bungee mod or by threading long zip ties thru the mount hole / drive cage. As I don't normally mount the drives singly, cooling is usually a 120 or 140mm low-rpm fan covering all the bays in use.

One drive or two shouldn't be vibrating that much...

but you can always do this: https://www.moddiy.com/products/CoolFrame-Bla … ck-Bracket.html

I like it!

The thing is....
I have a number of SCSI drives. And yes. My 10k IBM disks are loud. Yet they are nothing, compared to my Seagate 9.4gb 7200rpm drive. Maaaaan.... That thing is louder than a vacume cleaner. My 5400rpm 1gb Seagate Hawk are more silent. An Hitachi 80gb IDE drive sounds like an airbus compared to that Hawk. To me the IBM drives are just as loud as the early Hitachi 80gb IDE drives. Those that came, right after they took over IBM's harddrive production. The bad thing.... The IBM drives make extreme heat. They get really hot. Finally I have an 3200rpm Connor 40mb SCSI drive that are near silent. It is running cold as well, and are currently installed in my 286 machine.

Regarding my vibration issues. If I may explain. When using my IBM drives....
If I have them on the table, or on top of an open case. Then the noise is extreme. If I hold them in my hand (perfect sound damper) then they are pleasent to listen to. Somehow the drives give out an vibration, that results in some wierd ass sound. Much like a drill in concrete. I am after some kind of damper, that will isolate the drive from the case. Something with a rubber solution of some sort.

For the heat issue, then I have usually stuffed in an 80mm fan on top of the drive in the drive cage. It works well and the drive gets warm, just not hot were it is a problem to touch it. I just wanted to hear what people here are using them self.

SirNickity wrote:

I mean... you gotta kind of work in their universe, not the other way around. Typically, with a 10kRPM SCSI drive, you fight the heat with big loud fans. Noise is dealt with more or less the same way as with children: Place them in an isolated room and shut the door. The point is performance -- nothing about the whole contraption is meant to be pleasant. 😁

Well...
Amiga's and Mac's usually had 3200/4500rpm SCSI drives installed. Shure it is not industrial and +10k rpm drives. Yet SCSI are not strictly industrial you know. 😉

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote:

Motor & recalibration noise aside, I normally avoid 10K drives in retro builds and try to stick with 7.2K Fujitsu-branded ones which I've found to be as quiet as any. For vibration I try and mount the drives in 5.25 bays using either the bungee mod or by threading long zip ties thru the mount hole / drive cage. As I don't normally mount the drives singly, cooling is usually a 120 or 140mm low-rpm fan covering all the bays in use.

Thanks for the tip. 😀

luckybob wrote:

One drive or two shouldn't be vibrating that much...

but you can always do this: https://www.moddiy.com/products/CoolFrame-Bla … ck-Bracket.html

Exactly the thing I am after.... Love it. 😜

Newer generation and unused or lightly used 10K scsi drivers are not very loud. Cherry pick the quiet ones. That is what I do. There are two noises - bearing squeel and head access. Which noise bothers you? Bearing squeel volume increases with age and use. I hate this noise and dont use drives which have this kind of noise. As for head access noise, usually later generation drives are quieter. Also, if you put a fast scsi drive in a slow system, head access noise will be quieter. If you want quiet scsi, you can use scsi2sd or anAcard bridge adapter with an ide drive.

I bought one of these. They are cheap enough for testing purpouses....

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Black-PC-3-5-Inch-Ha … bs-PT:rk:6:pf:0

Last weekend I installed a Seagate 10k 36GB drive into my G3 beige tower.
Sound and vibes were great 😁
I liked that feeling of a 1970s hard disk enclosure.
But the drive got HOT. Range ca. 55-65 centigrades.
Not good!

For this reason I deactivated thermal fan regulation by tampering a bit in the power supply and changed drive.
The "new" Fujitsu 15k 73GB drive is just great!
It is super quiet and does not get hot (feels like 40-45 centigrades).

See also:
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/forum/vie … p?f=21&p=49#p49
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/forum/vie … 15&t=6&p=50#p50

So... I ordered one of them "shock absorbers" cheap from eBay, and got it in the mail today. Tested, using two identical drives, one without the shock absorber and one placed directly on the table. My table is one of them hollow ones, that transfers sound extremely good and so it was perfect for testing resonance from drives.

It eliminates roughly 2/3'rd of all noise, produced by resonance, and the sound from the heads moving are equally eliminated by the dampers. Of course this will have no impact on the noise the spinning platters produce. I think a case will make a barrier anyway, and I am testing drives that are not mounted inside a closed case anyway.

Another great thing is that I can mount a fan on it, yet heat travels up, so I am not shure why all these solutions have the fan location under the harddrive. Why??? Seems kind of strange to me. Personally, I will look for a solution that involves some kind of heatsink that I can mount on top of the drive and then air blowing from the front and back into the case.

I am happy enough. Cost me just under 11 Australian Dollars, to eliminate 2/3'rd of resonanse noise that are normally going into a case or were ever the drive is mounted. I just can't stand that noise. It is like the worst bad unpractised throat singing in my ears. This way I can spend more on a good fan. I know that Noctua is highly regarded for silent and reliable operation, yet what else is out there?

Maybe buy a sort of "heatsink" if such a thing's availabe? I have seen 15K drives come with a "cooling bay".
For me, the louder the drive the better.
After so many years of useful, but boring, CF I absolutely love the sound.

amadeus777999 wrote:

Maybe buy a sort of "heatsink" if such a thing's availabe? I have seen 15K drives come with a "cooling bay".
For me, the louder the drive the better.
After so many years of useful, but boring, CF I absolutely love the sound.

Well... There is allways these things. Yet they seem like they eighter will break down after 1 month or have horrible fan noise.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/80mm-4Pin-12V-Hard-D … bflgK:rk:1:pf:1

Then there are these things, and using enough of them, combined with an 8db or lower fan, should provide a better result.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Ultra-Thin-Pure-Copp … Xtsd:rk:15:pf:0

All I need to make sure of, is that I can mount a fan directly in front of the drive, between the drive and the front panel of the case. Personally I like CF cards, when I am running IDE. Yet SCSI need to be real drives. Until they break down or gets too expensive. Then I will go the SCSI-SD way. (Need to cool and take care of them SCSI drives)

it will be fine with just a fan. here is a quality one that should easily fit: https://www.ebay.com/itm/263919860551