XSReviews

Introduction

Noiseblocker have been around for some time silently (notice the pun?) removing noise from PC’s all over the world. Today I have their NB-X-Swing which sounds like something that you would find in a sex shop, but no, it’s a HDD noise reduction device.

Specs

As Noiseblocker are a German company and they haven’t been paying their English translator enough this month, their specs are all in Germish (German and English) so I’ll write this part.

Time to start Swinging

The X-Swing comes packed in a rather uninteresting box with German scrawled all over the back. The front of it shows the X-Swings in their full glory and the Noiseblocker logo.

Inside the packing, you find the ‘Swings themselves, a short multilingual manual, and a whole set of screws. There are enough screws to attach the X-Swing to your 5 1/4” bay, but only one set of screws to mount a hard disc, meaning that you can only use one HDD with the X-Swing if you don’t have any screws hanging around.

The X-Swings themselves look like bike parts as they are made of the ‘cool’ anodised aluminium that bikers lust. The angular lines and non-symmetrical design all add to this effect as well. Connected to the awkwardly shaped chassis of the X-Swing are two large black cylinders that house a socket that you screw the mounting screws into.

These cylinders look like they just shroud the screw hole, but the screw part, and the part that connects to the X-Swing itself only goes down about 3mm; the rest of the cylinder is rubber. That’s a lot of noise absorbing rubber.

The way that the X-Swing works is pretty simple. You attach the metal ‘frame’ part to your hard disc directly, and then screw into the rubber parts. The bit you screw into and the part that is connected to the frame is only held together with rubber. Essentially you give your hard discs rubber suspension allowing your hard disc to vibrate without the motion being passed onto the case.

Unfortunately, to get enough noise eating rubber between your case and the hard disc, you have to install the X-Swing into a 5 1/4” bay. This could be an issue to anyone who has a large quantity of hard discs and not many free 5 1/4” drive bays. However most cases have more free large bays than hard discs. Considering as you can mount two HDD’s per drive bay, there shouldn’t be a problem.

On the sides of the X-Swing there is the Noiseblocker logo and the ‘X-Swing’ product name. These are printed in white and look great, and will look even better when installed on your hard discs.

The X-Swing is meant to look good, even though it will barely been seen in your case once installed. That said, would you rather receive these, or a plain black one? I think the answer is obvious.

Installation

Installing the X-Swing is nothing short of easy; simply screw the frame to the hard discs and then screw it into place in your computer. The X-Swing can be used with any case, no matter what kind of crazy tool less design it employs due to the face that it has the same screw holes like a CD drive and in the same place.

Testing

While we couldn’t carry out a scientific decibel test, we could harness the power of human ears.

We mounted two drives on the X-Swing, one of which was a 36GB WD Raptor drive that used to sound like computers of old rumbling like a hungry stomach every time something was loaded. The other hard disc was a WD 80GB Caviar SE SATA.

On turning on the computer, I was greeted with silence from the hard discs. Seriously it stopped ALL of the noise coming from the discs. You could hear the sound of the hard discs spinning as you would expect as this product isn’t meant to stop that, but the vibrations were a thing of the past.

These HDD silencers would be perfect for anyone wanting to take that last step at quietening their PC. The first thing you do is replace the fans for silent models, then get a passive CPU cooler, then what do you do? That’s where the X-Swing comes in.

If you are looking to make a silent HTPC then these are probably going to be a safe buy as they remove any hard disc sounds that could be transferred and thus amplified by your case.

Conclusion

The X-Swing is simple, and as a result, effective. There are no bells, and neither are there any whistles. It’s just aluminium and rubber, but put together in such a way to improve the sound of your PC no end.

If you’re plagued with hard disc rumbling, then choose the X-Swing. You’ll be surprised.

Pros	Cons
Looks good	Price
Completely silences HDD vibration
Simple installation

I’d like to thank Noiseblocker for providing us with this HDD silencer.

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