Quiet Mod

'If the box runs 24/7, make the bastard quiet!'

That was my first thought for this mod/overhaul. This particular machine is a web server. I call it ZBox. It serves www.zagadka.org at the moment. Primarily its a learning tool for me. For a long time now it's been on the books to give it a 'noise overhaul'. It's just too damn loud to sleep with, particularly when its in the living room. It also interrupts television viewing with hard disk seeks! No More!

<gallery>490;What a noisy mess.</gallery>

A double edged sword...

This webpage is also teaching me CSS, something which I have been meaning to learn for ages. Hopefully it meets with your approval! =) I won't be using anything really tricky just the basics.

PLAN A:

I was originally planning on using the 5 ¼ to 3 ½ adapters for the job grinding U shaped slots where the drive mounting holes were for the grommets to sit in. I ended up being lucky because the slots in the sides of the adapters, where you put your screwdriver to tighten up the drive screws, were just the right size for the grommets.

<gallery>2451;Grommets and Brackets.</gallery>

Originally I was going to use spacers screwed to the drive that would perform as "lugs" and sit inside the grommets. With no spacers in sight looked in the box and I found some main board standoffs. These ended up being very useful later as thread adapters. Once I fitted, or tried to fit, the brackets and drive into the bay I discovered there was not enough clearance. I did fit it in there, some forcing involved. This was useless though because it needed to be a little loose with some 'play' so the de-coupling would work.

PLAN B: "Oooh those grommets might fit in those slots on the case."

Discarding the adapter idea I decided to check the nuts and bolts box. Yep, plenty of M3x30mm and M4x30mm. The problem was they didn't fit the thread on the hard disk. I ended up using the brass standoffs as adapters as they have a "computer course" thread on the bottom end suitable for the drive and an m3 thread or "computer fine" thread.

<gallery>491;Parts + Tools</gallery>

PLAN B; A Problem:

I fitted the grommets into the case and discovered that the distance between holes on the case were different to those on the hard drives. I needed some sort of offset. Back to the bolts box; I found some L brackets. Using four of these and two M4x5mm pan heads + nuts I made two offset brackets. I then screwed these to the rear set of holes on the drive with some M3x5 pan heads. Next, using two M3x15mm pan heads, 4 nuts and 4 washers I created "lugs" to go into the grommets.

<gallery>492;Offset with Grommet</gallery>

To fit the drive like this I had to loosen the M4 pan heads so that the lugs would fold down and remove one of the M3x30mm pan heads to give the necessary clearance to feed the drive into the 5 ¼ bay.

<gallery>493;Mounted Drive</gallery>

<gallery>2454;Mounted Drive - Front</gallery>

Next to tidy the case.

Using some white/clearish spiral binding from the bits box I bound all the power leads together. Next I replaced the ATA100 cable with a rounded ATA100 cable. Once all that was sorted I folded the CDROM's IDE cable up and then used 4 cable ties to hold it neatly together. I also used another length of spiral binding to tidy the case LED cables. Actually hiding the cables isn't really an issue here. This is primarily for A) Tidiness and B) Airflow. Because the fans are only running at 7 volts the air needs to be able to move.

Looks beautiful... Now for the noise.

I have read about the 7 volt trick on the OCAU forum. Using Google I found a few <a href="http://www.bit-tech.net/article/52/3">diagrams</a> along with a particularly <a href="http://www.nomad.ee/micros/quietpc.shtml">useful diagram</a> that incorporated a capacitor and a diode. These extra components are a kind of fail-safe. Configured this way they feed the fan 12v initially guaranteeing it starts. Once the capacitor has charged it drops down to just below 7v to the fan, the diode drops roughly half a volt.

Checking my other favourite box, my connector box, I found myself a female Molex and a pair of 3 pin fan headers. I also got myself a 1N4007 diode and a 1000uf cap. The spec says 3300uf but I couldn't find one, so this will do =)

Now! To work on the 7v Trick.

To start with I cut two lengths of red and two lengths of black cable, only short because it's going to be an adapter. Next I stripped the ends and tinned everything including the Molex inserts and the bottoms of the 3 pin header. Doing this makes it much easier later. After raiding my heat shrink supply I found some 3 to 1 heat shrink for the capacitor legs. The reason I used 3 to 1 is the normal 2 to 1 will fit over the Molex insert but wont shrink as far, the 3 to 1 will fit over and shrink snug to the cap leads. I also cut to length 5 pieces of clear heat shrink and two small "bands" of clear heat shrink about 3-4mm long.

I started soldering each component as per the diagram feeding on heat shrink where necessary. After that was done a quick spray with my DSE hot air gun shrank the heat shrink. Those two small bands were positioned halfway down the length of the two fly leads and shrunk to keep the wires neat and together. You can see in <a href="../gallery/quietzbox/IMG_9666">this</a> picture that our cat Angel is getting into the electronics too and "helping" me with the heat shrink...

Cool, now put it together...

After assembling and heat shrinking I installed the adapter into the system. Powered the system up briefly, made sure it worked and then tidied everything up. I incorporated the new adapter into the loom by unwinding some of the spiral binding and refitting it. One thing to remember with this is that the cables are tucked up the top, not an issue because the case doesn't have a window! If it had one, they would be tucked away of course...

Write some stuff...

Well you are reading it now. I will definitely be pursuing CSS further and learning some more. Some might just say "OMFG CSS is teh win!" and it would be true. Very cool. A project for next time would be the power supply fan.

Thats all from me.</p>

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