Noise from desktop disk drives

[Steve Elliott]

We have recently installed 5 SparcStation SLCs, each with a 104MB desktop
disk drive. The fans in the disk drives emit a nasty high pitched whine.
When all 5 are running at the same time the noise in the lab is
intolerable.  Has anyone else come across this problem? Do Sun know about
it, or better still, do they have a solution?

We had an engineer up here yesterday on another job and he had a look. He
had heard that reversing the polarity of the cables to the fan would cut
down the noise a lot. It did. The fan didn't work!!!  We concluded that
the noise is caused by air moving over the grille on the chassis, rather
than the grille in the casing.

I would be interested to hear from anyone else who has come across this
problem.

Steve
se at uk.ac.lancs.comp