Last updated: 05 April 2005
The foam box "bird house" hard drive mounting was not as quiet as my previous suspension mounted system, particularly the seek noise of the Seagate 7200.7. So I decided to have the best of both worlds and suspend my drives inside the box! I did this by running elastic through the box and using nylon clamps to position the drives vertically. It took a bit of adjusting but I got it so they aren't touching the box at all.
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Here are the drives suspended with elastic in the box. After this photo was taken the openings were covered with cardboard/duct tape to ensure all the air comes in through the bottom filter, as before. |
You can see the nylon clamps held tight with thumb screws. I'd never get a screwdriver in here! The vertical piece is for lateral strength, not really needed since I reduced the tension and used a softer elastic than at first. |
I'm very pleased with the result - the benefits of the hard drive box/filter as explained below, and the silence of a truly suspended system, which IMHO cannot be beaten for hard drive mounting. It's actually quieter than a normal suspension system (in theory!) as the box contains some of the sound too.
I've recently done a complete overhaul of the case/cooling system in my PC, as my temps were getting a bit high in hot weather and I was having to crank up cooling fans so they were getting too noisy. Here is the culmination of my efforts, as usual most ideas gleaned from other people's projects on the Silent PC Review website.
My system specs are:
I had hacked and cut my old generic case so much it was looking rather tatty, particularly as the green paint job I had given it a couple of years ago had started to chip in some places. So I bought this one, which looks rather nice in shiny black and suits me perfectly.
Bizarrely it has an intake fan next to a totally blocked intake area, but this didn't bother me as I was intending to intake all the air from the bottom. In fact it helps reduce noise escaping from the front, the most direct path to the ears.
Mods to the case:
After my previous efforts with 3 Briggs & Stratton air filters over my intakes were not totally satisfactory, I discovered that lawn mower filters are quite restrictive, and decided to go for an automotive cabin pollen filter instead.
 I found this at my local Ford dealer. It's from a European Ford Focus, and it is about as big as I could fit on the bottom of my PC case. |
 The fan is a Panaflo 80mm for perspective. It's big!! |
 I removed everything from the case and got to work with my shiny new Wiss tin snips (thanks to Crisspy's Guide making short work of the required hole enlargement. Note this is actually my old case, which I used first to prove the experiment |
 Here is the hole cut in the new case. Note the two cold cathodes underneath. The small blue box is the inverter for them.
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 The filter is rather thick, so although I already intended to fit castors to life the case off the floor I had to mount them on wooden blocks (painted black) to raise the case even more so the castors wouldn't touch the filter when they rotate. It also widens the gap between the filter and the floor which should help the air intake. I secured it with masking tape. |
My previous set-up of suspended hard drives would not work in my new case, as it relied on sucking air from a front intake which I no longer have. As I now needed to suck all the air through the big bottom filter, this required a variation of another of Bluefront's inventions, the "Bird House", which is basically a box that encloses the hard drives with a fan mounted on it, attached directly to the air intake (in my case the bottom filter).
Here's the idea:
The advantages of this setup is as follows:
 I used floor foam matting, which I cut to shape and glued with a hot glue gun. Here it is before mounting the front panel on with the fan. |
 Close up of inside the HDD box. The Samsung is on top, Seagate on bottom |
 Installed in the case with the Nexus 120mm fan |
 I had to extend the box to cover the entire filter area, losing the bottom couple of PCI slots in the process. Not a problem as I don't need them anyway. |
 I moved the 120mm fan from the inside of my FSP300-60PN and soft mounted it on the outside with rubber fan grommets. The Yate Loon fan had enclosed corners so I had to dremel them out to mount the grommets. This should increase airflow and reduce turbulence noise inside the PSU. |
 The additional space inside the PSU also meant that I could add more heatsinks, as the stock ones are rather small (due to the space normally taken up by the fan). I cut up some bits from an old heatsink I had and bolted them on top of the existing ones with thermal compound in between. |
 With the fan mounted on the outside of the PSU it was touching the rear of case at the recessed faceplate area. So I had to move the PSU into the case slightly with motherboard standoffs. I sealed around the gap now created by glueing strips of rubber (cut from the old Briggs & Stratton filters I no longer need). |
 Finally I hooked the fan up to my manual rheobus, and keep it at 5-7V unless I'm gaming/encoding. Note that this is my old case. The new one has no exhaust fan. |
 I copied another of Bluefront's ideas with his single fan PC. I bought an Aerocool HT-101 heatsink, which aligned perfectly with the PSU fan only a few mm away. Now I had no need for the CPU fan so I removed it and the plastic shroud (not shown here) |
 I made a cardboard duct that directed all the air going into the PSU across the heatsink fins. I painted it black and taped it in place. |
 To keep the elegant black look I stealthed my two optical drives, and spray painted the floppy drive and rheobus plain black. |
 Here is the completed setup. You can see how the various mods form part of the overall "total airflow path" through the PC, cooling the hottest components as efficiently as possible. |
 Finally, two red cold cathodes attached underneath either side of the filter gives some added bling to the case. I've attached them to my rheobus so I can control them from the front panel. |
 Rear shot showing the slightly recessed PSU and the blocked fan holes. |
I should really call this project "A Tribute to Bluefront" as I've plagiarised so many of his ideas! But as they say imitation is the highest form of flattery!
Overall I'm extremely pleased with it now. I now have a PC that has only two fans in the entire system - both quiet undervolted 120mm ones. This is compared with four previously (80mm Panaflos, now relegated to the cupboard for another project!). Temperatures are excellent even on hot days (ambient can reach mid-30s C during the Sydney summer, and we have no air conditioning!), and it is virtually silent.
I realise I am chucking all the heat from inside the PC into the PSU, but exhaust temps are fine and it is running perfectly stable at the moment. As it is not a particularly high powered system I don't see any problems with manually controlling the PSU fan.
One thing I noticed is that the hard drive seek noise is louder than before, particularly from the Seagate (the Samsung is much quieter). This isn't surprising as the safety mat foam the drives are mounted in is not nearly as good at decoupling as the suspension system they were in before. I plan to insert softer foam around the hard drive mounts which should decouple them more, something like this:
[Update 5 Apr 05 - I've actually suspended my drives inside this box. See top of page]
One mistake I made - I cut the bottom hole a bit too wide - not for the filter, which fits over it perfectly, but for the hard drive box. The box has to sit slightly off-centre as the motherboard is in the way - particularly the lower PCI/ISA slots (yes, I still have a mobo with an old ISA slot in it!!) and the front panel/USB headers. So the lower edge of the HDD box nearest the motherboard does not rest on the bottom of the case, it sits over the hole above the filter. This leaves a gap where air could be sucked from within the case, not through the filter. So as a quick fix I attached a strip of cardboard to the bottom edge of the box that covers the gap. Not ideal, but it works.
You can see the blue cardboard strip
(taken from a
CCFL packaging!) covering the gap.
If you've got this far, congratulations! It's a bit long winded but I hope there's some useful info in there for some people. It's been fun doing it and it is never finished, so check back here in a few months time to see what other crazy things I have done!
Pangit
