shortymike

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Mar 23, 2006
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So I was thinking about putting some foam under my HD cage to try and eliminate some noise. When looking, I found some hard (for foam anyway) polyethylene used for sound damping and some softer conductive polyurethane used for shipping ICs. Is the conductive property something I should be thinking about? I ask because I know some hard drives are grounded (like when using the Zalman ZM-2HC2) just in case it's not plugged in or something. However, the foam's resistivity is pretty high and marketed for protecting against static charge anyway.

TIA
shorty
 

chuckshissle

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Sound proofing is nice but with the sound insulation foams also traps heat and increases you system ambient temperature. I have the same for my side case panel, my system got quite but got warmer as well. But with some good air cooling and vents I was able to get rid of the heat problem. Try using rubber washers for screwing the hard drives to the case. It helps a lot and get rid of some of the vibrations, thus making it quite. I've use rubber washers on my rig as much as can. I specially use it in moving parts like fans, hd and psu. So try that and reduced your pc's noise.
 

shortymike

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I have the rubber washers for the screw mounts so that won't be able to ground the HDs. Will the foam be conducting enough or do I have to run a grounding wire?

By the way, thermal won't be an issue since I'm only putting foam where there wouldn't have been any air flow (not over the whole case).
 

chuckshissle

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I'm not using any grounding wire for my hd but its been running fine for over 6 months now. Im not worried much about grounding the hd to the case since its' attached to the psu which is grounded as well. Yes, psu with three prongs/ connectors are grounded, so don't worry about the grounding issue. :D
 

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