What to do about a loud hard drive?

[super skoda]

A buddy of mine called me up awhile ago and tells me that he's going to Africa for a couple of years and wants to know if I want his G3 and ProTools rig (882). So I think it over for about a millisecond and tell him ok.

I get the whole thing set it up, plug in a mic and all I can hear is the god-awful noise coming from the external hard drive. Does any body here have any good tricks to keep their drives quiet?

-thanks.

[Lostboy]

the only things i can think to do would be:

1. record on the other side of the room (or in a different room than the one the hard-drive's in), using automatic punch-ins.

2. put some kind of artificial wall inbetween you and the hard-drive so it's isolated somehow.

hope this helps.

[@?,*???&?]

Fan noise is an annoying reality of the new digital recording systems. I've seen baffles used in the studio, I've seen blankets and pillows socked in around the unit at home. Isolating the units and running proper cable lengths to get the machine out of the control room is probably your best bet. Removing fans could be as well if you've got a slower spinning hard drive. Many times, the case is about 80% larger or than it needs to be and there's plenty of room for air to circulate around the drive. Finding a quieter fan might be an option too- there probably is some kind of 'whisper fan' that's too expensive for a drive manufacturer to worry about installing and maintain their price point. I wouldn't pursue removing a fan though for a 10,000 RPM or 15,000 RPM drive. Those run extrememly hot. If you decide to install a second IDE or ATA drive in the G3, the drive won't have it's own fan and will rely on the MAC's main fan as a cooling device so you'll be consolidating potential noisemakers. If you are borrowing the system, spending the $100 or so for your own internal drive may make sense. You can always put it in your new rig later! The drive will be like having your own 'master tape'. Plugging in and installing a drive is a snap. For many, many years tape machine transport noise in a control room was an issue in a control room. Many studio isolated the decks in their own machine room which created it's own set of problems. Even then, isolating multi-tracks from the control room environment always made it seem like you were mixing with 'air'. There's something exceptionally ergonomic about hearing the transport wind and then stopping tape at an appropriate place but gut instinct. Obviously fan noise now has bollocks to do with that in the digital domain!

[Randy]

I put my machine in a closet and got extension cords for the monitor and the keyboard. There is a certain length that you cannot exceed, so be a little careful with that. I don't think a cord that is too long will blow anything, so give it a try. Apple's website has tech notes on the machine you will be using with all the pertainent info.

You can still hear the machine if you really listen, but once the music starts it pretty much disappears.

[super skoda]

Hey every body, thanks for the advice.

I tried piling towels ontop of it but I was worried about heat so I left the back oncovered. I also don't have a closet in my recording room. The drive in question is a lacie 7500rpm drive.

I think I might build an insulated box that I can take on and off.

[ottokbre]

get a harddrive scilencer. looks just like the ones the put on gunz, only with heat synchs running off of 'em.

[eeldip]

ummm. unless you are really poor, i would suggest buying a new drive. you could get yourself a decent firewire drive for $150.

although you might run into authorization trouble moving all the software to the new drive.

[jajjguy]

I am lucky enough to have a tiny office room off my living room, so i use the former as a control room (headphones only!) and the latter for tracking.

If you have only one room to record in, can you put just the computer outside the door in the hallway or next room? You wouldn't be taking up much space out there, and it would help the noise problem a lot.

[XXGABEXX]

I just got one of these for work:

http://www.macconnection.com/scripts/pr ... _id=285275

And it isn't even the cheapest one out there. Work doesn't know that I only need 500mb of that. The rest is up to me to fill.

-GABE

[DeafinONEear]

dude, gabe-- that's a 4200RPM drive... I would like to know if you can get over an 8 track count on that thing... access time must be ridiculous!
Super Skoda, I honestly wouldn't use anything less than a 7200 RPM. Have you been looking around in GoogleGear?

Has anyone heard of the SilentDrive?? I have two in my system (running two IBM GXP series drives) and it has done A LOT to quiet them. I'm running a self-built watercooling system that has the resivoir and radiator satalited (is that a word) into another room and now the loudest thing in the room (after the silentdrives were installed) is the buzzing of the monitor. For $35 it's worth a try for internal drives.

[ordinary_monkey]

Hey Deaf -

From your link to the silent drive page:

SilentDrive has the thermal capacity to cool hard disk drives that dissipate up to 5W of heat. However, drive manufacturers do not readily specify the heat dissipation of their drives. Therefore, Silent Systems has established the drive?s spindle speed as a proxy for heat dissipation. SilentDrive is specified to operate with hard drive spindle speeds of up to 5400 rpm. Whether the hard drive is an IDE or SCSI type is not relevant to the heat dissipation limitation. However, most SCSI drive spindle speeds are higher than 5400 rpm and therefore are not generally considered compatible with SilentDrive.

Probably wouldn't matter, but it doesn't look like these things are spec'ed for use with most recording drives (as you said generally 7200+ rpm).

D

[justinf]

The Silent Drive enclosures seem to work fine with 7200 rpm drives--I've done so for 2 years or so with no problems. Seems like the cutoff was 7200 when I bought mine.

However, the fan is always the worst noisemaker for me, it seems. I've been thinking about moving to water cooled, but damn it makes me nervous. You like yours deaf?

[XXGABEXX]

Hey Deaf, I actually only use it for back-up. Works great for that.

-GABE

[soundhack]

i replaced my loud hard drives with seagate barracuda iv drives last year. these drives are nearly silent and $125 for 80 GB. here's a link:

http://www.transintl.com/store/moreinfo ... duct_ID=76

[jkudler]

if you google, you can find a bunch of info. i searched for "g4 fan noise" a while ago (though you have a g3, i know) and found a few sites with advice. i did some kind of mod that involved removing the fan guard, but it didn't seem to make too too much difference. there's also several companies that sell devices to make things quieter, from less noisy fans to big rackmount devices to house the whole computer. my current plan is just to get extension cords and move the computer to the opposite side of the room, behind a chair or something. you said you have an external hard drive? you might be able to just move that far away.

-jesse