Slowing HDDs

[BonerDoner]

This may sound like a fairly strange question, and I did a search, and was unable to come up with anything. Does anyone know of some tweak or software I can use to slow down the rotational speed of my hard drives? I sleep with my head literally 2 feet away from my case, and the high pitched whirr of the hard drives all night really gets on my nerves. Sometimes I shut my computer off at night, but I very often leave it on so that others on my network can access shared files. For streaming videos etc. the hdd doesnt need to be spinning at 7200 rpms, so is there anything I can do to slow it down?
I was reading about a guy who made a mini itx server that booted off of a compact flash card, and the hdd only spun up when a computer asks for a file off of it, meaning when there are no requests, the computer is entirely silent.

Thanks

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, Your drives shouldn't be running all night. You don't say what OS so this is a generic answer. Find 'Power Management' and set up your HD/s to power down after about 15 minutes of inactivity. Might as well also set it to put the Computer to sleep as well. Jim

 

[Matthias99]

Well, that's a good answer if the system is on and just sitting idle. If you're downloading files or something overnight, that won't help.

Some hard drives have acoustical management software available (it doesn't "slow down" the rotation -- they run at a fixed speed! -- but slows down the seeks of the read/write heads so it makes less noise). Mostly newer ones; if the feature is not available for your drive, it's just not doable.

You might try an elastic mount to cut down on vibration. Check out www.silentpcreview.com for lots of tips on quieting down your system.

 

[BonerDoner]

Sorry about forgetting to specify the os. Im running winxp pro. Also, I'm using an antec sonata case, so the hdd is already mounted using rubber grommets.

Thanks for the help.