In my Cooler master Scout 2 case the standard HDD brackets are plastic and they make a fair bit of noise, dose anyone know if any company makes a rubber bracket or rubber bushes to help reduced the vibrations coming from the HDD's?
I have lined the inside of the HDD rails with felt and that made some difference, but I bet I can do better.
Like streetguru said use rubberbands. you dont suspend them on the bands you just put the bands around the HDD and then mount them like you normally would.
I tried fully suspending a 3TB seagate drive in my Define R4 using sewing elastic, but even with suspension that drive/case combo still produced a very audible low frequency hum. Eventually just threw some more cash at the situation and switched over to SSDs cause I didnt want to deal with it any longer.
If your hard drive is vibrating enough to cause a lot of noise, then it's probably vibrating enough to cause a significantly reduced life of your hard drive. Rubber bands can help with the sound, but I think you may need a solid mount if you want this drive to last. I have similar mounting hardware to yours in my case, but have no noise, so your particular drive may just be prone to heavier vibration.
I'm guessing that you have a couple of extra 5.25" bays. You could try some brackets like these:
Been using DIY elastic suspension for years, inspired by this article - SPCR drive silencing This eliminates all contact vibration noise from HD transmitting to pc. This works better than any case mounting i have seen so far. I tried using the rubber mounts included in a new case recently, but couldn't tolerate the small amount of HD noise more than a day
I have used suspended drives for years and not had a problem. A relative has one of my really old builds with a 40gB Seagte IDE still running after more than a decade.
With the elastic tensioned the disks are held very securely
Suspension or rubber mounts only prevent noise being transmitted and amplified by the case, there may still be some airborne noise
There is a small temp difference compared to having full metal contact for case heat sinking, but couple of degrees is no problem in a well cooled system
The noise reduction compared to using grommets is marginally better in my system and i want the quietest option for audio recording work.