The Cube, althought a magnificent computer, is not as quiet as
Jobs said.
The faulty is the very noisy Maxtor HDD.
So the idea was to replace it with a 2,5" HDD, with additionnal
benefit of less power needs.
You first have to unmount the hard drive.
Unscrew the 3 screws (don't worry, the stay in place).
Unplug the power and the IDE connectors and take out the HD of its place.
Take off completely the heatsink.
You now have access to the HD cage :
How to mount a 2,5" HDD there? Simple, you have to make a bezel.
The final positon of the HD is determined by the position of the IDE connector.
So I made a bezel of cardboard, put the 2,5" HD and its adaptor in place
and drawed the final position of the HD on the bezel.
The bezel and its prototype :
I had somme copper to make the bezel.
The HDD is fixed to the bezel with 4 screws and connected to a
2,5"-3,5" adaptor.
Three holes were made on the top to fix the bezel to the Cube.
Done :
Finaly I put onlt two screws only.
You can see that the middle hole is not well done. But I could
not put a screw there without 5 inches long fingers.
Sideview :
You cen see that the HDD is not vertical. The goal is to have
more air flow to the cpu.
Now my Cube is perfectly silent.
With the 8500, you can't hear the graphic card fan.
But you can hear the main fan when you put your head near the Cube.
The Cube is now approximatively as noisy as a Mac mini iddle. The difference
is that the noise doens't increase. And, as the Cube is under the desk,
you don't hear it at all, you hear more the CRT.
You can see in the benches that
the Cube is not slowed by this 2,5" HDD.
Here are benches of the old HDD (IBM 3,5" 80GB 7200 rpm)
and of the new (Samsung 2,5" 160 GB 5400 rpm) :
In sustained read and access time the 2,5" HDD is even faster.
(that's because MacAAM was activated at "quiet" on the IBM. Wihout
MacAAM the access time of the IBM was 7,7 ms).
But speed was not the goal of this mod.
Desk of my son with the Cube:
back to Cube
