Hard Disk Drive Silencing & Cooling Techniques

Here is a collection of free do-it-yourself tutorials about computer hard disk drive silencing and cooling techniques. If you have written a guide yourself (or if you know of tips and tricks not mentioned here), please submit a new entry.

Home-Made Radiator for Hard Disk	How to construct a home-made aluminium radiator for a hard disk because of a permanently humming cooler.
Silencing a Hard Drive	Different silencing mods: an acoustic cabinet made of 1.5 mm aluminium plate and silicone sealant to reduce vibrations, a custom radiator and the implementation of additional cooling of radioelements for the tiny drive electronics to prevent them from overheating and noise generation.
A Noiseless Hard Drive in One Day	Different techniques of noise reduction.
Alternative Means of Lowering the Hard Disk Noise: Hot Switching OFF	The idea is simple: switched off hard disk can't make noise. This guide explains how to add a separate power switch for the computer hard drive.
Keeping your Hard Drive Cool and Quiet	How to attach a HDD into a Silverstone SST-FP53-S Hard Drive Cooler/Silencer hard drive enclosure. A solution to noise protection as well as cooling for a hard drive.
HDD Decoupling	This tutorial shows how to use a piece of plastic to isolate the HDD vibrations from the PC case to make the computer more silent. Additionally a LED illuminates the plastic to make this mod even more nicer (in German).
Selfmade HDD HeatSink	How to attach a heatsink to the back of a Quantum FireBall hard drive, for better cooling.
Hard Drive Noise Reduction - Cheap Method	A lot of hard drives of today do make a significant amount of noise. A lot of this noise is caused by vibrations, and that can be very annoying. All you need to cure the vibration are two pencils or similar, and two or more thick rubber bands.
Noise-Free HDD	A guide to a noise free HDD using stuff you can find in every home. With some rubber and little patience you may turn a Raptor into a quiet baby.
Vertical HDD Mounting	This guide explains how to mount two 3.5-Inch HDDs vertically into their slot using the Cooltek Disk Silencer. This way the 5.25-Inch slots will be kept free, the HDDs become decoupled and the cooling will be optimized (in German).
Foam HDD Decoupling	How to decouple a drive by using foam rubber (in German).
German HDD Decoupling	How to keep HDD vibrations away from the computer chassis (in German).
Quantum N.N.	From the Not So Serious Department: Here are some tips to help computer enthusiasts with problems that plague many computer users: a whining hard drive. Nothing is more annoying than a whining hard drive, except for maybe a whining co-worker, so if you don't need your hard drive to drown out your co-worker then follow the steps below. The solution: take apart the HDD completeley and use plenty of grease to cover the platters and the spindle to make the drive working smoothly again.
Vantec VorTex	To reduce the risks of overheating ruining your hard drive, hard drive coolers are here to help. This review examines a professional cooling system.
DIY HDD Water Cooler	Your HDD got hot? Here is a selfmade water heat sink made from copper which keeps cool and looks cool (in German).
Heat & Noise Decoupling	There are two advantages of decoupling: noise reduction and better cooling (in German).
Noise Reduction with Household Items	This guide shows how a hard drive can be effectively silenced using some household items e.g. gel packs and an aluminium enclosure.
NAS Silencing	Reducing Fan noise of a NAS device. First the noisy components haved must be found by opening the box and doing an aural inspection. The high pitch whine told that the noise was either caused by the disk or the fan. The disk vibration was actually caused by loose screws, so that was easily fixed. The fan noise has been lowered by soldering a resistor to the appropriate circuit.