[UCLA-LUG] quest for quietness

[tchow]

The following isn't too linux specific, but there is a
tad.

I was thinking since i'm gonna be living at hitch this
fall, that it might be quieter than hendrick was for me
last year.  the cafeteria near my room last year masked
any noise from my computer so i left it on all the
time.  my house is fairly quiet so the loudness of my
computer is very noticeable now.  since hitch is
quieter i thought that my computer might keep me up at
night.  and of coures, i would like to maintain maximum
uptime.  thus begins my quest for quietness...

i first suspected that my power supply was too loud.  i
bought a pc power and cooling "silencer" power supply.
they advertised up to 10 decibels quieter.  (BTW, 10
decibels is huge.  think back to physics 1B...)
immediately after to the new power supply is in, i
could not easily tell the difference.  but closer
inspection reveals that it is quieter than the old
one.  definitely.  however, i also noticed that my old
power supply wasn't that loud to begin with.  the noise
from either power supply is masked by the other noises
in my computer.  so if u are thinking of getting one of
these pc power and cooling ultra quiet power supplies,
make sure that your old power supply is the source of
noise.  if it is, then its probably a good buy.

cpu fan is relatively quiet, so check that off the
list...

maybe the loud noises are from my auxilary fan?  i have
a standard 3" auxilary fan.  i yanked the power of the
power supply, and realize the thing is really loud.  so
then because i was bored and paranoid, i drew up a way
to connect a external switch to my fan.  it took me
forever, but after a trip to radio shack and some
grinding of my case, i now have a switch for the
auxilary fan.  my auxilary fan isn't totally necessary,
i had it put in b/c i was worried that my voodoo2 would
overheat when fraggin' people.  but still my computer
is too loud.

which means that all the noise must be my hard drives.
scsi drives are notoriously louder than ATA drives.
here's the linux part of my message.  i was wondering
if there was a way i could power down my scsi drives.
BIOS doesn't touch scsi.  my scsi BIOS doesn't have any
power management options.  so BIOS's can't be used to
power down.  i checked out the man pages for apm, apmd,
and hdparm.  none of these can power down a scsi drive
so i'm thinking that for this too be done, it has to be
implemented in the kernel.  but then i hear powering
down a drives isn't necessarily a good idea.  it tends
to break them quicker.  and also scsi drives are
usually intended for high-end applications so they
don't power them down.  again a quick check of physics
1B explains why drives might break quicker if powered
down repeatedly (for those of you who understood it...)

any ideas/comments?
tchow