Antec drive bay only?? Where to find?

[Gravity]

I built an atec sonata for a friend two weeks ago. I was very impressed by the grommet mounting of the hard drives. So impressed, that I considered buying the case. I currently have a TT Xaser II that I like but I'm on the hunt for silence and the drives are the last source of noise.

Is there anywhere to find the drive mounting system that antec uses or do I have to get the case to get that system?

I also went to the hardware store today so that I could try to find some grommets. I got some but I think I'd have to drill bigger holes in my Xaser drive cage to get the grommets in. Still playing with that whilst I await the community's wisdom.

Much thanks,

 

[mechBgon]

Isn't the Sonata's drive cage riveted to the case itself? I did have a look in Antec's spare-parts area but no dice.

 

[mechBgon]

Oh, and bigger picture: build a little server, put it in the basement, put all them noisy drives into it, share them on the network, smack a gigabit-Ethernet NIC into each system and connect them with a Cat5e crossover cable. Use a single quiet drive in your own rig to boot from.

...or ...or ...did you know you can have an Ultra320 SCSI cable up to 10 meters long?

 

[tracerbullet]

Something to consider might be rigidly mounting the hard drives into their cage like normal, and then somehow suspending the cage itself with rubber grommets? Maybe bolting it to the floppy bays above it with some sort of suspension?

Hopefully that made sense...

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: tracerbullet
Something to consider might be rigidly mounting the hard drives into their cage like normal, and then somehow suspending the cage itself with rubber grommets? Maybe bolting it to the floppy bays above it with some sort of suspension?

Hopefully that made sense...

It does. I did almost exactly that with my Lian-Li... the drive cage is supported by a piece that's attached to the floor of the case with four rivets. I drilled them out, enlarged the holes enough for grommets, and put metric 5mm x 0.8mm/thread bolts through them with shake-proof nuts, so the whole cage is isolated on grommets.

However, I did before-&-after audio recordings of my system, and the grommets didn't help much. As you can see, there is 30,000rpm worth of SCSI riding on there and it is actually not obnoxious or anything (fluid bearings), but it's not silent either, and the grommets didn't change it by more than maybe 1dB (?). I don't regret trying it, since a side effect is that the HDDs have a cushion to help protect them from physical shock.

 

[Gravity]

Those are all good ideas.

The grommet notion was noble but flawed. If I want to proceed, I must enlarge each mounting hole in the drive cages to accomodate the grommet. As thin as that alum is I'm not sure I want to fiddle with it. I guess I could....then there's an issue with the length of the screws and the fitment of the cages to the case if the cages are a bit wider due to the grommets.

What a freakin hassle. SCSI cables are attractive but I don't have any scsi drives. I guess I could setup a linux box with all my data in it and use kind of like NAS? Could I do that with XP?

I think the real solution will be moving into a bigger house with an office or study area where I can plug in my monster and let him whine all night. I'll build a sff box and underclock it and use no phans for my personal flogger.

Again, many thanks for your ideas.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Gravity
Could I do that with XP?

Absolutely. In My Computer, click Tools > Map Network Drive, then map whatever drive letter you want to the shared drive or folder on the remote computer. So if the remote computer is named "NAS" and it has a shared folder called "Music," you could map drive letter M: to \\NAS\Music and from now on, it appears in My Computer as drive letter M:.

The key thing is to have a fast-enough connection that it isn't bottlenecked by the network connection. Depending on your goals, a 100-megabit connection may be enough, or may not. A direct PC-to-PC gigabit connection would be simple, using a crossover cable and two gigE NICs like Intel Pro/1000 desktop NICs, and would give you probably 80-100 megabytes per second of throughput, enough that it wouldn't be a bottleneck most of the time.

For a remote system, consider an Asus A7N266-VM/AA with an AthlonXP maybe. Stable, good PCI performance, cheap, onboard video, onboard Hypertransport-based 100Mbit NIC.

 

[MikeDub83]

Fan Isolators

 

[Gravity]

Originally posted by: MikeDub83
Fan Isolators

Thanks Mike, that's a neat link that I have yet to see. I have 4 Panaflo L1a's and one thermaltake on a rheostat. I can shut them all off and still have some drive noise. It's the not to loud but very, very high pitched tone.

Again, thanks.