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Methods for silencing Sky+?
[Deleted User]
Posts: 37
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Hello.
I have my Sky+ box in my bedroom (about 10ft away from my head) and at night I find the noise from the hard drive and the fan (when it wakes up) annoying when I'm trying to sleep. I guess you could put me in the "very sensitive to noise" category.
I'm currently considering removing the hard disk and putting it in a Smart Drive 2002 enclosure outside of the Sky+ box, with extended cables going out through the "digital interfaces" port.
Has anyone tried this, or any other method to quieten down the Sky+ hard disk? Any possible reasons why my plan wouldn't work?
Thanks for any help.
Jon
I have my Sky+ box in my bedroom (about 10ft away from my head) and at night I find the noise from the hard drive and the fan (when it wakes up) annoying when I'm trying to sleep. I guess you could put me in the "very sensitive to noise" category.
I'm currently considering removing the hard disk and putting it in a Smart Drive 2002 enclosure outside of the Sky+ box, with extended cables going out through the "digital interfaces" port.
Has anyone tried this, or any other method to quieten down the Sky+ hard disk? Any possible reasons why my plan wouldn't work?
Thanks for any help.
Jon
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The HD in the SKY+ was not sourced for it's silent operation and the fan certainly wasn't but there may be something you can do.
I may be on slightly shakey ground but if it is a Maxtor drive then you can use there Silent Drive software to enable the "Quiet" mode and as for the fan something like "Fan Mate" could be used to slow the rpm and thus reduce the noise.
Many users have reported replacement Hard Drives not only run quieter but are a lot cooler, that could be an option worth exploring.
I have my drive running in Quiet mode, and there are no problems whatsoever. Dual record, and simultaneous playback at 30xFF works fine. In fact, I did some experiments in my PC and found that the performance difference is fairly negligible. It is absolutely essential to put your drive in Quiet mode otherwise the seek noise is intolerable, especially for Sky+. I've had two drives from Maxtor bought from the same supplier about a week apart, and the drives were in different modes when they came out of the box.
Can you supply a download link for the software needed to change this on a Maxtor drive? I've spent ages trying to find this on the Maxtor site with no joy....
TIA
I also spent a good hour at least trying to find it on the Maxtor site last week, got it eventually through their knowledge base
The link you need is:
Amset utility
It's a good idea to download the Powermax utility from the Maxtor website too - this is easier to find, just select your drive from the dropdown at maxtor.com and it'll be in the list of software.
The Powermax installation is a floppy image creator which will create you a nice bootable floppy. you can then edit the autoexec.bat on this floppy to comment out the powermax starting up automatically , and extract the amset utility also onto this disk. Saves you having to go creating yourself a bootable floppy to use amset, and you have handy access to powermax should you need it too.
Many thanks!!!!
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It could be that the fan comes on in response to the temperature that is read from the hard drive.Can't argue with the fan coming on even when the HD has been removed but that would lead me to believe that his SKY+ is in a very warm area with little or no external ventilation.
I would however doubt that SKY+ can measure the HD temp when the HD is in an external caddie with nothing but a power cable and IDE cable attached:)
I have never heard my fan kick in on my v1 and it's performed well, not flawlessly but 99.9% as it should have done.
That's not quite the same as saying SKY+ can do that:)