Fanny noise in hard drive

March 20, 2006 8:10 PM

How do I quiet a noisy external drive fan? Or should I?

I now have three USB/FW external hard drives which quite frankly are asleep most of the time (ie spun down). However they each have an internal fan that goes full speed no matter what. So is there a way to make the fan run slower? I heard somewhere that switching the fan from 12v to 5v may work, but how do I do that? Also will it kill the drives if the fan is too slow to move adequate air?

posted by Gungho to computers & internet (6 comments total)

If the fans are louder than they used to be, you might try blowing them out with compressed air and oiling the bearings. Sometimes my external drives get REALLY loud from the dust building up in the fan.

I don't know if it's wise to screw with the voltages. I know I wouldn't do it.
posted by fvox13 at 8:22 PM on March 20, 2006

Silent PC Review
posted by MLIS at 8:23 PM on March 20, 2006

These are just DC fans, their speed is controlled by the voltage they receive. PC power supplies include 12v, 5v, and 3.3v rails. You probably have a 12 and a 5 going into the enclosure, and could tap the 5v to run the fan. Nothing dangerous about it really, you'd need a multi meter and some electrical tape really. But, I have an external hard drive with no fan, and I have no problems with it. I have a Metal Gear Box enclosure; you can find them cheaper elsewhere if you look and want to upgrade. If I were you, I'd probably just unplug the fans. If you don't run the drives 24x7, it should be fine.
posted by autojack at 8:50 PM on March 20, 2006

It probably will be fine, but make sure you feel good about unplugging the fans before you do it. If the enclosure was designed with a fan, it might not be engineered to act as a good passive heat sink (like the way enclosures that don't have fans are often engineered). I'm not saying that's how it is, though. Definitely your judgement call.

If you're just storing movies and other non essential junk, then I wouldn't really worry too much. But if you've got like "super_important_research_that_I_need_to_pass_school.zip" on there, maybe just get another (fanless) enclosure for 50 bucks or so. I have the Vantec NexStar, it's pretty good.
posted by Drunken_munky at 10:29 PM on March 20, 2006

I wouldn't just unplug the fans, that's an invitation to overheat and destroy the hard drives. The fanless enclosures have conduction cooling to prevent this, so you can't just turn a fan-ny enclosure into a fanless one. Likewise with running them at lower voltage. Be very very careful of the drive temperature.

The problem with hdd fans is that they're small and cheap: both things that will mean more noise for a given performance due to their high speed and craptacular bearings. Best option is probably to go buy proper fanless enclosures and transfer your discs to them.
posted by polyglot at 10:33 PM on March 20, 2006

Thanks. These are new, aluminum- tight fitting enclosures, so I guess i'll break out the multi meter-basing it on some fan is better than none.
posted by Gungho at 3:58 AM on March 21, 2006