Again we focus on more ways of reducing the noise levels of our aging server case, this time we look at a hard drive silencer from Grow Up Japan, which claims to reduce hard drive dB levels to 30, but does it work?
Even though our hard drive is a 7200rpm SATA drive and fairly modern, it vibrates widely inside our test server case, so we thought we would check out this offering from Grow Up Japan to see if it would help reduce the noise levels.
Before we begin let’s have a look at the box contents, inside you get six screws, one 5.25" smart drive cabinet and some connectors that are designed for SATA and IDE drives. So in a nutshell everything is in place for you to get started.
Installation is a piece of cake, you place your hard drive inside the foam padded smart drive case, which also uses copper on the base and underside of the closing lid for cooling the drive and the exterior itself is made of aluminium to help. You then add the cables which will enable you to connect your drive to your PC's power and SATA/IDE interface.
The smart case has been tested with 15,000 rpm drives but as we did not have one we could tell if the drive was any good for hard disks at this speed.
But with all this said and done did the drive make much difference to the noise? We have to report it did! Almost to the point of being un-detectable. As we had the AcoustiPack material inside our case (reviewed earlier) we decided to open the side of our PC to see if this was adding to the effect. But no, with the case open it was still quite and we had to put our ear to the drive in order to hear it.
It does cost about £60 which may put some off and it will add to the weight of your PC, but we think it is a sound investment, not only can it help reduce the heat - which could improve the drives life expectancy - it was whisper quite in the process.
