Step 7: Hard drives and optical drives

There are no fans in hard drives or optical drives, but they do contain a load of moving parts that can make a racket. Whereas some drives are designed for high capacity, others, such as the Samsung HD300LJ hard drive (£90 from Quiet PC) are designed for quietness. The HD300LJ (shown on the right of picture 1) uses fluid dynamic bearings, which have a thin layer of lubricant between the shaft and the sleeve of the bearing, making it more quiet and robust.

We've gone a step further by enclosing the quiet hard drive in a sound-deadening Silentmaxx Aluminium HD silencer (shown on the left of picture 1; £37 from Quiet PC). Pictures 2 and 3 show how to insert and fix the hard drive into the silencer, while picture 6 shows us installing them into the 5.25-inch drive bay of the Silentmaxx ST11-PRO chassis.

The silencer shrouds the disk (see picture 4), except the rear ports, which are still accessible, as you can see in picture 5. Don't worry about the drive overheating -- the enclosure acts as an enormous heatsink that channels heat away from the disk. It also comes with a set of rubber mountings on either side, which absorb the vibrations of the disk drive.

High speed optical (CD or DVD) drives can be one of the biggest contributors of PC noise. Even 24x models can have a whopping spindle speed of 12,000rpm, and if you're using a disc that's slightly warped, the resulting noise and vibration can be infuriating.

Typical drive speeds can reach in excess of 48x, which gives a transfer rate of 7,200KBps, but the data rate of an MP3 file is only 16KBps (128kbps), so you'd only need a speed of around 0.1x. As a result you may want to set the speed of your drive to a much lower level. CD Speed 3.1 (picture 7) is an application that can be used to set the read speed of a drive, reducing its spin speed and any subsequent vibration. Remember to crank the drive speed back up to its maximum when installing large software applications from a CD or DVD.