DIY: Make your Vostro's HDD less noisier

[Lao]

Hi all!

From day 1 my Vostro's HDD was noisier than the Lenovo I had before, even tough I used the same hard drive. This meant that the hard drive was interacting too much with its' metal bay. Today it was cleaning day for me (you can also see the Acer here) and so I thought it would be good to put my ideas into practice.

Took the hdd bay out and started by using some tape. What I did was pretty simple: wrap some tape around the areas where the HDD came in contact with the HDD bay (chassis).

In this first photos you can see where I put the tape on the hard drive:

On both sides:


And near the little holes (4 of them) that touch the chassis:


Next you can see the side parts of the chassis that interact with the drive:


And with the hard drive mounted:


Since I was doing this, I thought I might as well do it on the DVD drive, so I put some tape on the chassis, right were it comes in contact with the DVD drive:


Doing all this dropped my hard drive's noise quite a bit. I can really sense it. The good thing about Lenovo was that it had 2 rubber pieces on each side of the hard drive, so it never touched the chassis. Unfortunately Dell doesn't have it.

[X2P]

good idea but how does the tape withstand heat?

[Lao]

It's made for electrical isolation, so my guess is that there will be no problems with the heat. My HDD's temp is around 38-40 degrees. I don't see any problems there.

[X2P]

Thanks Im thinking of trying it but could you give me an update after a week including some gaming? it would be great!!!

[Lao]

Absolutely. As soon as I play something I'll post the results.

I also would like to replace the thermal pads on the video card, but I didn't have the proper Torx tool to remove the heatsink from it. I get 49-52 degrees on the video card just browsing.

[Lao]

All cool and quiet after 1 hour of FarCry2. I was pretty sure about the tape not burning or something, but I wanted to test it before I say something here. For me it's all ok.