Quietpc.co.nz Hard Drive Solutions

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The issue of noise from hard drives has remained a long-established barrier to the dream of owning a silent PC. The whir and whine from a drive’s constantly-spinning platters and clicking from its head-seek can soon become annoying to anyone who values a quiet life whilst they use their PC. And pity the user whose PC has more than one drive! As you would expect, we have offered several solutions to this problem over the years, but we have yet to come across a product as effective as the Smart Drive from an unusually-named Tokyo-based company called “Grow Up Japan”.

The Smart Drive is a tidy-looking acoustically-sealed enclosure for any 3.5” hard drive which can then be mounted in a standard 5.25” (DVD drive-sized) bay. However, what makes the product stand out is its attention to detail as far as design is concerned. Its enclosure and mounting designs are pure genius, and it uses copper plates (which are twice as conductive as aluminium) to extract heat. In fact it is so efficient at extracting heat that some hard drives can actually run cooler in a Smart Drive than if they were running without one!

Other HDD silencing products tackle the issue of heat extraction in a variety of ways, including the use of heatpipes, vented openings and fan-assisted cooling. However, the Smart Drive uses none of these compromises and delivers both brilliant silence and excellent cooling. Even toasty-running 10,000 and 15,000 rpm hard drives such as WD’s Raptor series can be safely silenced! In fact, using the product with these incredibly loud drives gives a very dramatic benefit, so at last you can have both performance and quietness.

For anyone who still remains unconvinced that the encasement of a hard drive is a good idea from a reliability point of view, in February 2007 Google produced a research publication which examines the reasons for failure on over 100,000 of its consumer-grade hard drives. The paper sent shock waves through the IT industry when it flew in the face of conventional wisdom and concluded that in fact “there is a lack of consistent pattern of higher failure rates for higher temperature drives, or for those drives at higher utilization levels”.

One other problem with some cheaper HDD enclosures is that they do nothing to dampen the low-frequency vibrational noise from the hard drive. This typically manifests itself as a hum or rumbling noise, and can be amplified by the PC chassis. However, the Smart Drive addresses this issue very effectively through its use of soft heat-conductive rubber and sheer mass - the product weighs 1.1 kilograms! And one other benefit of using a hard drive enclosure is that the product brings benefits in terms of sealing the drive from harmful effects of dust.

The Smart Drive has undergone several minor design refinements over its lifetime and has now reached the pinnacle of a brilliantly engineered and executed solution. Despite its high price, sales in Japan and the USA have now reached nearly 100,000 units and we are proud to bring this product to the UK for the benefit of customers who demand the best. And because it is built like a tank, we are sure you will enjoy the benefit of the product for many years to come as you transfer it from PC to PC when you upgrade. Definitely a Smart Choice!

Model Name	Smart Drive
Model	2002C
Manufacturer	Grow Up Japan Inc., Tokyo, Japan
Hard Drisk Type	3.5” Parallel & Serial ATA, SCSI
Cse Bay	Standard 5.25” Bay
Weight	1100g

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New from Zalman, we are proud to present an unusual but very effective product which not only quietens your hard drive, but makes it run cooler too! The ZM2-HC1 builds on Zalman's heatpipe technology first seen in their video card heatsinks, and now applied to the cooling of a hard drive.

The product consists of two aluminium bars which are screwed to the sides of a hard drive. Each bar is split in half and between each half are clamped ten separate heat pipes, which link each side of the drive. As the drive gets hotter, heat is transferred to the liquid in the heatpipes, which vaporises and rises up the pipe where it cools, condenses, and runs back down to the drive again. This process ensures that heat is constantly being drawn away from the hard drive, much more effectively than any passive heatsink could manage.

The process is completely silent, and in addition its cooling properties, the heatpipe cooler assists in reducing the noise of the hard drive through its rubber-damped drive mountings which ensure that vibrational noise from the drive is not transmitted into the chassis. This significantly cuts down on the "rumbling" and "clicking" noises which are very common in hard drives. Unlike the SilentDrive enclosure, Zalman's heatpipe cooler can be used even with the fastest and hottest of hard drives, and will give both cooling and noise reduction benefits.

Model	Zalman ZM-2HC2
Weight	270g
Surface area	400 sq cm
Materials	Aluminium, copper and rubber
Dimensions (L x W x H, mm)	143.5 x 146.5 x 36.5

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New from Scythe is their answer to hard drive silencing, the 'Silent Box'! This product is very effective because it doesn't just eliminate virtually all the noise generated by the hard drive it also drastically reduces vibration. Apart from the metal cover and the Heatlane the whole hard drive is encased in rubber. To be precise the outer layer is Nitrile Butadiene Rubber while the inner layer is Styrene Butadiene Rubber. With all that rubber this all means that 'Silent Box' is a very effective anti-vibration product.

Heat generated by the hard drive is transferred to the aluminum cover by a Heatlane. This Heatlane is the same technology used in Scythe's FCS50 and NCU-2005 CPU coolers. The Heatlane provides excellent cooling, so much so that the 'Silent Box' is compatible with 10,000 RPM hard drives!

Enclosing a hard drive will typically increase its running temperature by around 3-5°C. For peace of mind, it is sometimes useful therefore to be able to monitor the temperature of your hard drive "real time" within Windows, to ensure that the drive is not overheating. For hard drives which support this feature, you can use a free program called DTemp to display the drive temperature in your Windows system tray. We would recommend setting DTemp's "Critical Temperature" setting to around 60-65°C, in line with most manufacturers' specifications. Click here to download DTemp.

For customers who have hard drives which do not support temperature monitoring, we sell a temperature-sensitive sticker which will assist in determining the maximum running temperature of a hard drive.

Weight	840g
Physical mounting requirements	5.25"
Enclosure material	Rubber and Aluminum
Drive type compatibility	3.5 inch, 10,000rpm max.
Maximum drive height	1" (2.54cm)
Physical dimensions	211(L) X 144(W) X 41(H) mm

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For customers who require the extra peace of mind of knowing the running temperature of their hard drives (especially while enclosed in a SilentDrive), we would recommend the DTemp software described above. Unfortunately not all hard drives support temperature monitoring, therefore we offer a temperature-sensitive sticker which will perform the same task, as a one-off operation.

First of all, the sticker is applied to a clean flat surface on the hard drive. After installing the drive and running it for a few hours, it can be removed and the maximum temperature reached can be viewed on the sticker. The sticker has temperature values marked in white boxes, and when a box has turned black, it means that the temperature written in that box has been exceeded. For safe operation, we would recommend ensuring that the box with the highest temperature (65°C) does not turn black.