A regular PC computer is as quiet as its loudest component. It can be processor or power supply fan, but usually hard disk is the loudest one. This is a howto on making your HDD as quiet as possible. I've made this hack after finding some hints on the net.

The main idea is to use self-adhesive bituminous (thus some call this hack the 'bitumenbox') silencing mat. It is used to silence a car interior, so look for it in a car shop.

I chose metal cover from an old CD-ROM drive as a case for HDD. It is easy to cut the mat sheet so you should have no problems to get something similar to this:



The above shows bottom CD-ROM cover. Here is a top cover:


And here is a hard disk put inside the box:


I've put a 1-wire digital thermometer onto the disk surface in order to verify temperature of the disk while running. The silencing mats are able to conduct heat very well, but I wanted to verify this ability (you can see that this is true on the last picture). You could use temperature sensor build into the hard disk, but mine had no SMART feature.


Here is a final result put together:


As a result, the hard disk is almost unhearable. You can only hear a little main motor noise when you put your ear directly to the surface. Heads seek is completely unhearable.

Don't worry about a temperature inside the box. The picture below shows disk temperature during 200 minutes of being powered on. First section shows how the temperature was rising during properly powered (but idle) hard disk. The blue mark indicates the time when operating system has been started manually. The pink mark indicates the time when hard disk stress test has been launched: