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Here's a crafty solution to noisy hard disks: suspend it with elastic! Jason @ HACKS tipped us off to this silencing technique. From Silent PC Review:
Jason adds:As the pictures show, the drive is essentially suspended on the stretched elastic. The resilience of the elastic stops all vibrations from passing from the drive to the case -- or vice versa, for that matter. The drive cage was rigged it up with two Barracuda drives (20G & 40G) and installed with a couple of machine screws at the bottom of my main PC with a decoupled low power 80mm fan in front of it (at the front panel intake hole).
Keep in mind that you'll loose some of the conductive cooling that you get when the drive is mounted to the case, so it'd be smart to do this in cases where there is decent airflow or find a way to attach some sort of heatsink to the bungeed drive.
The original poster stole this from here:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article8-page2.html
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Thanks, I updated the links.
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In drier climates the elastic can dry out over time and become stiff and brittle resulting in failure - check those cords every few months.
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Note that the drives probably should be grounded to the computer's case to avoid build-up of static electricity from the spinning drives. Just run a bit of wire from a screw-hole in each drive to a bare metal part of the chassis to be safe.
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Just an FYI but those spinning disks cannot in any way build up a static charge on the outside of the hard drive.
Aside from that, the drives are grounded via the power and signal cables.
-Bob
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Elastic suspensions like this are good for high-frequency vibrations, but convert the drives to a very low resonant frequency spring-mass system. Be sure that the drives are secured before transporting them any distance (wedges of styrofoam will do).
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