Having upgraded/optmized my cMP throughout the years I'm left with a well working, but noisy setup and am open to suggestions on how to solve this as it's very frustrating (I work with music among other things, so I need a quiet working environment).
My current setup:
I actually bought both this and the slightly faster Noctua NF-A8 FLX (2000 RPM) to make it closer to the original, but there's a chance it might stall at the slowest speed so I'll probably go for the NF-R8 Redux-1800 when I get round to it. This should take away the low frequency hum.
The biggest source of noise however are from the large enterprise hard drives, and I'm not talking about the spinning noise but rather "ticking" sounds which are heard all the time when the drive head seeks. Compared to smaller "personal storage" drives the seek action is very powerful and these movements are transferred throughout the drive sleds and elsewhere in the computer enclosure. I haven't found a way yet to dampen these actions, but I'm going to see if I can put at least one of the two 3.5" drives in the empty optical drive bay with a Sharkoon 5.25" to 3.5" adapter bracket and dampening rubber grommets, but I have to drill extra holes to provide for the 10 or 12TB new and differing mounting screw layout, so yet another thing on my "to do" list. I haven't so far found a solution for mounting both of the noisy 3.5" drives this way.
So if the above still fails to remove the noise sufficiently I wonder if I should rethink my setup. I got the 10 TB drive because it allowed my to have all my photos (in Lightroom) in one place. I just checked, and the photos alone take up around 6.5 TB, but then of course there are MP4 videos etc. which take up a lot of space as well, so there's no way around it -we all need more storage space as time goes by. But in a pinch I could have the photos on an external drive (and use in the OWC drive dock) and put back a smaller, quieter drive as my main drive. Not the ideal solution, but maybe something to consider.
I'd like to hear what you think and if you have other ideas which i could consider?
My current setup:
- Mid-2010 Mac Pro 5,1
- 3.46 GHz 6-core Xeon
- 24 GB (3x 8GB) 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC RAM
- MacOS 10.13.6 High Sierra (looking to upgrade to 10.14 Mojave soon)
- Boot ROM 144.0.0.0 (recently rebuilt by TSIalex due to corruption issues)
- Sapphire HD-7950 Vapor-X 3GB OC with boost GPU card (reflashed for Mac EFI bootscreen)
- Sonnet Allegro USB3C-4PM-E (dual-controller 4-port USB 3.2 USB-C card)
- 1 TB Samsung 860 EVO SSD (MacOS, apps)
- 10 TB Seagate Exos X-10 hard drive (user Home folders)
- 12 TB Toshiba MG07ACA hard drive (Time Machine backup)
- various other internal drives for Windows, other MacOS versions (currently trying various options out)
- external (USB 3.2/USB-C) OWC dual-bay 2.5"/3.5" hard drive dock for external backups, external file-archives etc.
I actually bought both this and the slightly faster Noctua NF-A8 FLX (2000 RPM) to make it closer to the original, but there's a chance it might stall at the slowest speed so I'll probably go for the NF-R8 Redux-1800 when I get round to it. This should take away the low frequency hum.
The biggest source of noise however are from the large enterprise hard drives, and I'm not talking about the spinning noise but rather "ticking" sounds which are heard all the time when the drive head seeks. Compared to smaller "personal storage" drives the seek action is very powerful and these movements are transferred throughout the drive sleds and elsewhere in the computer enclosure. I haven't found a way yet to dampen these actions, but I'm going to see if I can put at least one of the two 3.5" drives in the empty optical drive bay with a Sharkoon 5.25" to 3.5" adapter bracket and dampening rubber grommets, but I have to drill extra holes to provide for the 10 or 12TB new and differing mounting screw layout, so yet another thing on my "to do" list. I haven't so far found a solution for mounting both of the noisy 3.5" drives this way.
So if the above still fails to remove the noise sufficiently I wonder if I should rethink my setup. I got the 10 TB drive because it allowed my to have all my photos (in Lightroom) in one place. I just checked, and the photos alone take up around 6.5 TB, but then of course there are MP4 videos etc. which take up a lot of space as well, so there's no way around it -we all need more storage space as time goes by. But in a pinch I could have the photos on an external drive (and use in the OWC drive dock) and put back a smaller, quieter drive as my main drive. Not the ideal solution, but maybe something to consider.
I'd like to hear what you think and if you have other ideas which i could consider?
