Shark Man

Well, I would have posted in the original thread....if I could find it!

To recap:

3 hard drives, two Raid 0, one standalone. The standalone drive being the most problamatic - (the read/write head buzzes when idle, drive is healthy so can't get a RMA for it ). Plus its noisy when accessing anyway. The standalone drive is just used for backups so used its used only once a week. External caddy is not an option (i like to keep things neat - plus I've ran out sockets).

RAID drives are very quiet (Samsung spinpoints), just some motor noise resonating through the chassis. This has been cured by making custom brackets that allow me to use rubberised mounts, then futher mounting the drives in a rubberised 5.25" to 3.5" adapter. Works a treat.

Sadly the same can't be said for the standalone western digital. Its now sat in a accoustic caddy on rubberised mounts, and I can still here the heads buzz like its doing some sort of surface scan.

Windows power management is useless, beyond random in fact. So, I tried this: revoSleep It works, sort of. It will shut the target drive down, but after 30 to 60min, it spins back up again. Seems something in the OS or HD controller "sees" the drive and pokes it just for the hell of it, bringing it back online. <sigh>



So, looks like software is not going to sort it, what next? Physical disconnection! So, a internal power extention lead, with the 5v and 12v rails put through a douple pole toggle switch (actually only need to switch the 12v, but I did both). With the switch mounted externally to flick power to the drive on and off.

Obviously, it works. Better still, it seems to be ok switching it on and off with the PC running. (although I dismount the drive before switching off to avoid write caching issues - see below).


However, three problems:

First my one DVD drive had stopped working, it has power, but the system doesn't see it. May have disturbed a cable, so will have to look into that.

Second, my hard disk light is permanentally on. Now this could be the HD controller seeing the drive, but unable to access it due it not having power, or it could be an issue with the DVD drive. Also the BIOS post hang for 20secs on power on, which suggest its trying to access something that isn't responding. Yet it doesn't report any errors. Hmmm.

Finally. Write caching. Not an issue if the drive is powered on/off with the PC turned off. But it will affect the ability to "hot swap". In Vista x64 its default enabled. And the option to optimise the disk for fast removal (like a USB stick) is greyed out. Seems I'm not the only one to notice this (mainly SCSI users), I'm yet to find out how to sort this. I believe its probably a permissions bug related to the UAC not giving me full admin privilidges. Will need to do more googling. Unless anyone can shed some light on that.

So there you go. I think you can conclude that making a quiet PC is alot more tricky than it seems. Still, its a very queit system....the most prominent noise I can hear right now is the power supply for my monitors- which for a system containing five fans and three hard drives is pretty damn good IMHO.