Marilyn Leathers wrote:
> Hello everyone.  Sometime ago I bought a barebone kit from Tiger
> Direct. I built a nice PC for my daughter. One problem that I have
> with the PC is the hard drive hums. Any suggestion of how to quiet
> the hard drive.  Thanks!

Well, if it's an old ball-bearing drive, replacing it with a newer 
fluid-bearing drive will help a lot.  The newer fluid-bearing drives 
don't have anywhere near the whine issue (90Hz or 120Hz) as the old 
units.  Look through the reviews of drives over at NewEgg or look for 
user opinions elsewhere for whether the drive is noisy/quiet.

The most noise that modern drives now make is the chattering of the 
heads.  Some folks find it annoying, but I still remember the soothing 
sounds of my old 20MB 5.25" hard drive.  Where the seek noises were 
almost musical.

...

(off-topic)  You can spend a lot of money trying to silence a PC.  It 
tends to be a never ending battle where you replace one noisy part only 
to find the next-noisiest part is now the culprit.

Personally, I start with a good case.  Something like the Antec Sonata 
II, p160, p180/p180b cases (or some of the ones from Lian Li which are 
similar).  Those cases are pretty sturdy and mount the hard drives on 
rubber mounts to reduce vibration.  These cases use 120mm fans for 
cooling, which spin at a lower RPM (less noise) while moving the same 
amount of air.

After that, you get into going with low-wattage CPUs (such as the new 
AMD power-efficient AM2 socket CPUs) which can be hooked up to a large 
heatsink and a slower-spinning fan.

And sometimes, after you pack 8 hard drives into a case... there's a 
certain amount of noise that is simply unavoidable.

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