I have to move my node and now it run in my Living room. The system work on a home nas (raspberry pi and a 24 To Toshiba HDD). The problem is the noise, many of other HDD are more noisy but for a Living room it is not agreeable.
So I thinking about, to do a gracefull exit or to find a solution. I have see that in the forum who SNO poste pictures about home lab they speak sometimes about rack solution or other diy working solution, my be they are expert her for my problems.
I would ask if any of you have some tips to reduce noice, for the moment I juste put some cork pieces under the HDD it helps, but only to reduce the vibrations, the read heads make to mutch noice. So I don’t now if it is juste temporary maybe they is more activity on the HDD but the system run fully on hashstore.
Have some of you the same problems and maybe a solution, a noise isolation technique or something’s other?
The HDD itself, if it dosen’t directly touches anything, should not be noisy. It makes vibrations that are amplified by the rack/enclosure/case and those create the sounds.
So you must have
flexible cables that connect the drive to the system, not a solid interface, like in NAS;
rubber between the drive and the support;
if you use screws, they must have rubber gaskets;
rubber feet for the enclosure.
I found that one of the quietest solutions is putting the drive on some rubber feet, with no screws, on top of the pc/case; you can find for ex silicon corner bands in the DIY stores, or rubber bands/ addesive rubber bands.
If it must be enclosed, try putting rubber between drive and case and fix it with zipties.
You can try to soundproof the case also, but that is more complex.
I use an Asus case with mesh panels and no fans (n100 CPU passive coolled) and the drives are on silicon corner bands with zipties. It can hold 3 drives if I’m generous with the space.
I also have a Fractal Design Cube case, with screws and rubber gaskets, but is a bit noisy. Screws and rubber gaskets aren’t very good to reduce the vibrations.
Stay away from NASes.
External enclosures - maybe you find quieter ones but you trade speed (SATA > USB) for noise reduction.
