Logisys Aluminum HDD Silencer

While not a huge issue for a new build it is a pain in the rear for an existing system as you’d end up with metal shavings in your case forcing you to disassemble more of your PC than you’d intended. I personally just popped smaller screws through the holes and have the silencer hanging in the bay. The isolators fit tightly to the sides so it’s not rattling around in there but it’s hardly a method of attachment you’d want to pursue if you plan on moving your PC very much.

Once you’ve gotten the drive in place you put the bottom foam piece in place to prevent any electrical shorts from occurring and to stop the drive from rattling on the bottom piece. The bottom piece is attached with four screws and buttons the enclosure up nicely. If you’ve got a slimmer drive (Maxtor drives spring to mind) you’ll end up with the drive too far down in the enclosure to allow you to attach the power or IDE or SATA plugs, if that’s the case don’t bother, your drive needs to be 1" thick.

This is how the finished HD-Silencer looks. the front has a pretty nice raised Logisys logo that’s been milled to raw aluminum. The sad thing is that you’ll never see it, the HD-Silencer is designed to fit in your PC chassis far enough back from the front to allow you to put the drive bay cover in place lending a nice stealth look to the installation.

From the rear you can see that the connections for the drive are freely accessible. Once in place you can easily hook the drive up meaning that you don’t have to attach the cabling and try to thread it through your PC as you install the enclosure.

This is what I mean about the enclosure sitting back from the front of the case, in fact I think it sets far enough back that it could conceivably fit behind a switch type baybus especially if you drill the holes for the screws back a few mm.

That wraps up the assembly and installation of the Logisys HD-Silencer now on to the fun part: Time to dissect my findings.

Silence is golden
• Good design, the drive isn’t trapped in a box
• Detailed instructions
• Looks good even if you’ll never see it
• Does a decent job keeping the drive quiet
• Freely accessible drive connectors

Silence of the Lambs
• No heatpipes to be found
• The isolators use a larger than average screw: Drilling required
• Sound isolation material is basically a blanket for your drive
• Won’t work with thinner drives
• Tedious assembly process

In use I found that I can’t hear the drive access noises when running disk defrag or I’m loading programs like I used to. In fact the noises have diminished to the point where I have to strain to hear them. This is in comparison to the same drive that I’m using for my storage drive. I had bought 2 of the same drives for running RAID-0 but after a catastrophic failure a few years ago I’ve forgone striping due to the potential for data loss. It does however allow me to compare what I’m gaining in terms of quiet and losing in terms of heat dissipation.

Using Everest Ultimate to monitor my HDD temps through the onboard temp diode via SMART I’ve never seen more than 1*C difference between the drives idle and 2*C under load. Mind you that both my drives are being cooled by a 92mm fan and are (or were) in the same drive bay. With one moved to the HD-Silencer the temps on the drive still cooled by the 92mm fan have remained the same, 29*C idle and 34*C load, load being heavy disk defragging. The drive that I moved to the HD-Silencer has gone from 28*C idle and 32*C load to 34*C idle and 38*C load.

That’s an increase of 6*C idle and 4*C load. The drive’s not going over 38*C at any time so I’m still fairly comfortable with the temps. I’ve seen other silencers that keep the drive isolated in a box with no fans (as this has no fans) and there is no direct contact with the drive to the box’s sides at all. Those tend to run the drives up to the neighborhood of 50*C under load so I’m impressed with the Logisys design. Even though the silicone sheet seems like it would make a better insulator than TIM (thermal interface material) it does indeed do a decent job of transmitting the heat to the finned case of the HD-Silencer.

When it’s all said and done I’m awarding the Logisys HD-Silencer a 7/10. I’m dinging them for the heatpipe claim which is patently false and for the larger screws on the isolators. Otherwise the HD-Silencer is a fine product that does it’s job as advertised and manages to make some improvements over competing products. I know I’d feel perfectly safe tossing a Raptor in one and never be worried about toasting my drive.