Silenx LXHDSS Hard Drive Silencing Solution

I put this in a Series 2 Tivo because I have it in the bedroom and I can hear the hard drive actuators moving as they read/write to the drive from my bed when the TV is not on. It was keeping me up at night, and I would get frustrated and end unplugging the Tivo to get some sleep. I upgraded the hard drive from the original Maxtor 80GB drive to a 500GB Western Digital drive. The silencer barely fits in the Tivo, and you obviously have to install without the original Tivo hard drive mounting bracket. This silencer muffled the drive to barely being heard. Also, if your drive features AAM (automatic acoustic management), I recommend enabling that feature. That also helped make my 500GB Western Digital's sound even lower. With the combination of the silencer and AAM enabled, I can't hear the drive from my bed now. Life is good with quiet Tivo in the bedroom.

I have a caviar black drive that is known for being a bit noisy. Before this the noise was annoying, now it's back to silent. Use a bit of caution with installation and temperature management. There is definitely thought into the enclosure for heat management, but it's still padding that wraps up the drive like a blanket. I'm running hotter than i was before, but still below max spec temperatures. Rating is down to 4 stars for the gain in heat. YMMV.

Requires a lot of assembly. They could have easily assembled half of it before sending, but that probably requires paying for labor on their side.What you do not see in the product picture are the foam pads (see the pictures I attached), which are the real pieces that are supposed to do the silencing. I thought the heat sink shown was some sort of a rubber mount doing the silencing.It sandwiches your HDD-heatsink assembly between two foam pads, hoping to isolate it from your case enough to silence it. The reality is far from that. My drive is still very noisy. The foam pad buries the contacts for attaching the power and SATA cables, making it hard to attach. Since you center the drive, if you have a right-angle SATA cable, you won't even be able connect it to your drive, unless you pull the drive all the way to the edge (while the instructions ask you to center it as well as possible).Moreover, it is like wrapping your HDD into a blanket. There are thermal tapes that are supposed to transfer the heat from your drive to the heat sinks, but they do not make contact with my drive. See the pictures I attached, in which you can see the the tiny contacts the tape made next to the holes, and the gaps between the HDD and the heatsinks.All in all, the mechanism of silencing may be to overheat your HDD until it fails and goes silent.Instead of buying this, you may wrap your HDD in a piece of blanket, which may silence your drive better, while overheating it just as well. This is going back.

The SilenX Luxurae HD Silencing Solution really works. It truly does reduce hard disk noise to acceptable levels. I have a Hitachi Deskstar 3.5" 2TB 7200RPM SATA II 32MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0S00164 and it is one of the loudest hard disks I have encountered in my life. At idle the hard disk is unnoticeable but during read/right the noise is just too much. The vibration from this drive was so much that I had to change the whole computer case. Doing this helped with the vibration issues but I was still annoyed by its loud noise.I honestly bought this hard disk enclosure because it was cheap but I did not have much faith in it. The build quality is not excellent but for $10 is pretty good. In the box you will find the metal case composed of a top and bottom part which joins together by a series of screws. There are two foam pads that stick to the case and come in contact with the top and bottom of the hard drive. Two heat sinks that stick with thermal tape and screws to the sides of the hard disk. Also there is a piece of paper with "instructions" on it. The instructions could be better but I imagine that if you buy this you have opened a computer before and have some knowledge of computer hardware so it wont be an issue.The foam pads along with the metal case do the job of lowering the hard disk noise and vibration but at the same time act as an insulator. This is a real issue as the heat will build up in your hard disk drive If you think heat is bad for a cpu or a gpu then imagine what it might do to a mechanical device. Thats where the side mounted heat sinks come in to play. They serve the purpose well but like all heat sinks, will not work effectively if the air around is not cooled and circulated. So logically a fan is needed as an essential part of the setup. Now some cases might already have fans in front of the hard disks (3.5" bays) or even a space to put one. But this will not help our setup as the SilenX will not fit the 3.5" bay, it must be placed in the 5.25" bay (where the optical disk drives are usually at). Now you must fit a fan somewhere in front of the SilenX case. It may be a large fan or two smaller ones in front of each heat sink.The reason I gave the setup 3 stars out of 5 is mainly related to the heat issue. Just considering the noise reduction it might get a 4 or even a 5 but I have to lower the score as a fan is not a requirement for them, just a recommendation. On the product description they just state: "For additional cooling, the Silenx LXHDSS Luxurae Hard Drive Silencing Solution can be used with the 40x20mm 14dBA iXtrema Pro Quiet Fan." and on the box there is a similar recommendation but not a warning or a fan requirement. The same goes for the instructions as there is no warning relating to the heat. Now seeing this you might think that a fan is optional, well think again. I ran a temperature test using Hitachi Feature tool where the recommended working temperatures are: 10ºC (50ºF) - 60ºC (140ºF). Both of the following tests were done with the hard disk installed in the SilenX case. First I ran the test (random seek) for about an hour using a fan and the temperature did not go beyond 45ºC (113ºF). The second test I ran for about 20 minutes without a fan and the temperature rose to 53ºC (127ºF). Now this might not damage the drive to an unusable state but I am quite sure it will reduce its life.I do recommend the product because it does what it advertises, it reduces noise to very acceptable levels but a fan is a must and the product is NOT a drive cooler as indicated on the product description. Had the product warned about using it without fan or even including a fan for say $5 more of the asking price then this product would surely deserve a better rating.

Bought this to quiet a new HDD in our Tivo. Made a big difference. As quiet as it was before. The drive I bought did not have the AAM thing mentioned in the other review, but not really needed. Our Tivo also in the bedroom would wake us up, so this did the trick. Super fast ship!

Mine couldnt, but because of me not measuring, i wont rate down this product, its great, when i tested it to see if it made my hdd silent outside the case, it worked like a dream, couldnt hear the damn thing.

It makes a noticeable improvement in the sound level, though not completely silent. The metals have a nice paint job and everything seemed of decent quality.