Ultra Quiet eSATA Tower?

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flight16

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Oct 29, 2005
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I would like to attach an eSATA or firewire tower(s) of 3+ disks (like this)to a SFF PC running OpenSolaris10 and ZFS to use as a light storage server. The catch is that I live in a studio apartment, so I would like this thing to be quiet. I haven't had any luck finding a quiet external enclosure for HDDs. Do any exist?

Alternate Ideas:
  • Buy an external disk tower with enough space to line every panel with acoustic foam.
  • Just buy a regular PC case (looking at the P180/P182). This is the least favorable option just because of size (big), non-expandable for HDD options, and the annoyance of having to dig inside the case every time you need to swap a HDD.

Thoughts and comments are appreciated.
 
I'm not so sure that it is such a good idea to use 3+ HDDS in that small of a form factor with simple passive cooling. You could get a low RPM fan to reduce noise, and for complete silence (albeit overkill) you could watercool the drives.:eek:

Rest assured tho, without some massive heatsinks and at least a small fan or two, you could risk data corruption on the disks, while trying to keep things that quiet.
 
most of the time these devices come with rather loud fans, you could probably reduce the noise quite a bit by
  • replacing the fan with a noise loise one
  • dremelling out the fan guard and installing a wired-frame one
  • mounting fan and HDDs on gromets
 
drizzt81 said:
most of the time these devices come with rather loud fans, you could probably reduce the noise quite a bit by
  • replacing the fan with a noise loise one
  • dremelling out the fan guard and installing a wired-frame one
  • mounting fan and HDDs on gromets
Click to expand...

I guess that's what I might have to do.

A little off topic, I was also considering using a rack cabinet (thread here). I think that's what I'll be doing.
 
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