[Geeba]

Use an 80mm Double ball bearing fan... very quiet and only a small amount of trimming.... loadsa tuts on how to do it around to....

[Geeba]

"A 7200rpm harddrive won't give any speed improvements over a 5400rpm"

Comming from a PC tech background I've never really got my head round that in the wiki as generally 7200 DO out perform 5400 FACT on read and seek.... my 7200 sammy 250gb is definately more resonsive that the M$ installed drive ever was...

[HarshReality]

From http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/inde...d_Answers:

Also, laptop drives generally create less heat than standard drives. They consume far less power, which translates to less heat created.

I'd love to know where your getting or running your laptop drives.. I have 4 laptops (various manufactures one is built at home) and every drive that has ever come out of them after running a few hours or so would physically burn you when you touch it.

[tvdb-scott]

"A 7200rpm harddrive won't give any speed improvements over a 5400rpm"
Comming from a PC tech background I've never really got my head round that in the wiki as generally 7200 DO out perform 5400 FACT on read and seek.... my 7200 sammy 250gb is definately more resonsive that the M$ installed drive ever was...

Perhaps the IDE controller in the Xbox is a bottleneck? Xbox-scene's Xbox mod guide also seems to indicate that 5400rpm drives are preferred, since they tend to run a little cooler. It also says that either should be fine, though.

I'd love to know where your getting or running your laptop drives.. I have 4 laptops (various manufactures one is built at home) and every drive that has ever come out of them after running a few hours or so would physically burn you when you touch it.

Have you ever opened a desktop system and done the same with a normal drive that's been in use? It's the exact same way. It's mainly a physics thing, though... more power=more heat, which is why overclockers crank the juice into their processors but have to rely on fancy cooling techniques.

[sho]

Regarding performance, as with everything performance related I guess it depends.
The majority of XBMC related tasks is single user, sequential access.
In that case, increased rotational speed will most likely give you a marginal performance increase. (Observed by the fact that a 7,2K RPM SATA drive reaches anywhere between 70-90% percent of the performance of a 10K SCSI/FC drive in sequential access)
Also we need to consider that if you only need to deliver XMB/s. as is the fact when you stream media.
A better performing drive will not do much to improve that.

On the heat, as I have been out of the PC HW business for years now I don´t know where to look for data to support my claim, but here is my reasoning.
Laptops are all about reducing power consumption. Power equals heat.
So it stands to reason that 2,5" laptop drives generate less heat than 3,5" drives.
On the other hand their smaller footprint (volume if you like) can make them hotter to the touch than a 3,5", even though their overall heat dissipation is less than the bigger drive. (Much more density).

Here is some data to compare: (I actually found the data while writing this )
http://www.storagereview.com/articles/20...ook_8.html

[klaus1013]

Well this thread took off quickly! I very rarely play games on my XBox anymore, so I don't think drive speed is an issue. All it does these days is boot XBMC and then I stream content either from my local network or the Internet (never direct from the hard drive). I don't think the performance drop from 7200 to 5400 will be at all noticeable.

Now I hadn't thought about increasing heat, but there seems to be two schools of thought about this anyway. My temps are stable running the fan at 5v, but I'll keep a close eye on them when I switch to the laptop drive.

Thanks for the pointers.

Klaus

[klaus1013]

I've now replaced my old 3.5" 120Gb 7200rpm drive with the new 2.5" 80Gb 5400rpm drive. There is no noticeable performance drop in booting or operating XBMC. The drop is noise is huge though!

I used to hear the 3.5" drive spin up and it was noticeable while XBMC was running. I enabled the spin-down timer and this helped a lot, but I found the wait for the drive to spin back up annoying. With the 2.5" drive I can have it spinning all the time and it's pretty much silent. When I turn the XBox on now the only sound I hear is the DVD drive intialising. When I turn it off I don't notice any drop in ambient noise.

Temps have remained stable at around 50-60 degrees C, no jump since switching drives. If you're interested in making your box quieter, I'd highly recommend the changes I've made.

Klaus

[jgawera]

If you find you do want to increase your fan speed, but 12v is too big a jump, you can always try the old 7volt trick, connect your fan to +5 and +12 which will give you 7volt operating voltage.

You used to be able to get fan controller switches for PCs that did just this, just a switch that let you choose your voltage.

J

[klaus1013]

Thanks for the tip jgawera

Klaus

[gav1577]

Hi i did this mod the other day and have to say it makes a huge difference in noise. i installed a laptop hdd in the box. some thermalright chill factor paste on the cpu and gpu.and a hiper silent 80mm fan running at 20%. even if i put my ear next to the box i cant hear the hdd just a soft hum of the fan. also temps have dropped loads. cpu 32 degrees gpu 24 degrees and hdd 33 degrees also haven't noticed any drop in performance whatsoever. i recommend this mod if like your xbox nice and quiet like me

[pete]

hi,
im getting annoyed with the noise my stock xbox is making... can you tell me is it worth spending 50quid on a 80gb laptop drive and convertor when a 300gb+ standard size drive can be bought for the same price?

without opening my case up can you tell me what size fan is in a v1.6 box? (need to order a siiiiiiiiilent one i guess )

cheers

[MikeBeecham]

so I was looking at my box this evening, and it's definately the GPU fan that is making the noise. Gav..if I understand your post correctly, you have removed the GPU fan and heatsink, then added some thermalpaste and left it at that?

No replacement heatsink it's place?

I also have just bought a Hiper 80mm fan to go onto the case, but I want to get the gpu side of things sorted first!

[jmarshall]

GPU's on anything other than 1.0 xbox's just had passive cooling (ie a heatsink only) so you can probably get away with just that - monitor the temps though ofcourse.

Thermal paste alone won't do much good without a heatsink though!

[MikeBeecham]

I want to strip out the GPU fan and heatsink from within my XBOX v1.0 and replace with a new passive heatsink...mostly to cut down on noise.

Does anyone know of any good links, products that I can look at that, preferably, I can order from the UK?

Thanks

[HarshReality]

The Xbox is a small computer.. if you wish to be technical use an AMD or old intel clip heatsink... doesnt ness have to go in plce of and hook right where your existing heatsink does hell you can hang the thing with bread ties if need be.