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Smart Drive Neo SATA HDD Silencer
Discontinued
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Grow Up Japan Smart Drive Neo SATA HDD Silencer Ultra

SSD drives may be the future as far as speed an silence are concerned, but for sheer capacity, they can’t come close to a conventional spindle HDD. Silence your HDD once and for all with Grow Up Japan’s flagship SATA HDD enclosure with its unique independent internal drive acoustic suspension cradle.

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 Neo is the newest member of the Smart Drive family, and offers the very highest level of silencing and heat dissipation for your valuable hard drive. It is presented as a tidy-looking acoustically-sealed enclosure for any 3.5 inch 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. The Smart Drive’s product designers have stopped at nothing in implementing design features to reduce noise and increase cooling in every way possible.

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.

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 materials and sheer mass - the product weighs 1.2 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, Smart Drive 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!

The Smart Drive Neo has been shown to quieten a hard drive by over 15dB and reduce its running temperature by 6°C
The Smart Drive Neo has been shown to quieten a hard drive by over 15dB and reduce its running temperature by 6°C

Features

  1. Our best-performing hard drive silencer/cooler, no question
  2. Almost total elimination of noise from spindle and head servo
  3. Independent internal drive acoustic suspension cradle
  4. Compatible with all SATA 3.5” drives (even 15,000 rpm)
  5. Simple installation/removal mechanism for 5.25” bay mounting
  6. Future-proof: reusable for many years to come

Review

  • Tom’s Hardware

    If you install your hard drive into the HDD silencer by GUP, it will effectively eliminate almost all of the noise above idle level. (Product reviewed: Neo)

SpecificationsSmart Drive Neo
MaterialAluminium and steel (1.6mm)
Weight1200g
ManufacturerGrow Up Japan Inc., Tokyo, Japan
Hard Disk Type3.5” SATA
Case BayStandard 5.25” Bay
Warranty24 months
EAN barcode4536604049863
SpecificationsSmart Drive Neo
MaterialAluminium and steel (1.6mm)
Weight1200g
ManufacturerGrow Up Japan Inc., Tokyo, Japan
Hard Disk Type3.5” SATA
Case BayStandard 5.25” Bay
Warranty24 months
EAN barcode4536604049863

Customer Reviews

excellent HDD silencer

,

Really excellent performance from this device! Even after reading other reviews I was positively surprised, first of all by the build quality when I opened the package and secondly by the level of silencing it achieves on my rather aged WD raptor disk. Spin is inaudible, and the noise from read/write operations is severely reduced to, what I would say, is absolutely tolerable.

Additionally, it doesn’t seem to raise HDD temperature by more than a single degree under load, and in idle it’s actually lower than before.

Installation is also quite a straight forward matter, 10-15 minutes.

Despite the price, this is definitely a recommended product if HDD noise, spin as well as read/write operations, are a concern to you.

Cheers from Denmark, which has become a little more quiet now thanks to GUP Japan :-)

Probably as good as you'll get without going for SSD

,

Took the plunge and ordered a couple of these for my already fairly quiet Western Digital HDDs (the final part of the quiet pc jigsaw)

Spindle noise - gone Low Frequency Rumble - gone Head Seek noise - drastically reduced

It’s not perfect i.e. total silence (hence 9/10), but it’s probably as close to a SSD as you’ll get without actually buying one. These things are really well made and a significant chunk of metal (so quite heavy). Really easy to install the drives and the heat conducting pads are easily placed.

Are they worth the money? Well for my purposes (music studio), yes they are, but then I needed my machine to be as quiet as possible. I can’t give any quantitative measurement of how quiet my machine is now, but I can give a qualitative one; now the loudest noise in the room, or at least the most noticeable, is the sound of the water being pumped through the radiators of my central heating!

Superb product

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