MacPro Hum and Airport Problems

Question

Well…first post here and i wish it was more…positive. I love my shiny new MacPro but it does some pretty annyoing things. And I'm sure I'm not the only one experiencing these.
When i got my MacPro everything seemed to work perfectly. Absoluetly silent except for the faint whisper of the fans. Airport seemed to work great. The room i tested it in wasn't too quiet though.
When i took it home, first thing i noticed was a totally annoying, sinewave like hum, mmmmhm, mhhhhmm. Quick google search told me i wasn't the only one, and actually led me to several threads here. Well…next day, i took all the drive bays out, tightened the screw of my two drives (WD and Maxtor) put them back in slot 1 and 2. ****. Hum got worse. Took them out again, put them in 3 and 4. Hmm…silent? Not. Took them out again untightened the screws so the drive had some space to vibrate. Put them back into bay 3 and 4 which seem to be the only ones I could get the **** drives to be quiet. Well…that did it. NO hum, no nothing except for the fans. My head (which started to hurt because of the buzzing sound) felt relieved.
Thing worked for two weeks. Sometimes internet connection felt slow – thought it must be the metal casing.
Two days ago, i surfed the net, got tired, went down to take a nap, got upstairs again 3 hours later, found the machine sleeping. Pressed the mouse button and …****! What's that sound? Yeah, guess what, nice hum. Bah! Turned the machine off, restarted, waited, left the room…was still there. Thought I was going crazy. Two days later, right now, I'm sitting in front of a loud, buzzing MacPro. Nothing helped. Tightened the screws, untightened them, moved the carriers around…reduced it a liiiiitle bit, but i can still hear it. Bad thing is, it's the kind of noise you just CAN'T ignore.
My old workstation sounds like a 747 taking off, but that noise is actually less annyoing then the constant buzz. Drives me mad. I thought about retuning it and getting a replacement, but honestly, i need the thing.
Within the two weeks that it worked silently, i already installed all the important software i need (for osx+xp) and started working with it. Huge amount of 3D-Files and HD frames already on the disk. I went to check out other MacPros and they all hummed. Some very loud, some very faint. Judging from the discussion on the net plenty of MacPros do it, my guess is that ALL will do with the same combination of drives.
So why do i post this? Well…maybe someone else got a cool flashy new way of getting rid of the noise that hasn't been posted before. I'm going to try some rubber washers but I'm not too sure if that'll even work, seeing as theres not much space on the drive carriers for screw+rubber. So it gotta get some new, longer screws too, noot TO long though so it doesn't scratch the panel above the carriers. GAH. And here i thought this way of mounting drives was elegant. It IS, the MacPro looks totally great, even it's interior but ****…the noise!
Ah…i've nailed the "loud drive" down to the standard WD which was originally seated in bay 1 and now in 3. It's loud, however, it alone doesn't create a sinewave-like hum so i can live with that. The other drive (maxtor) is dead silent from normal distance, however, when i put my ear close to it, you can hear a VERY faint up-and-down-noise…thingy. I was thinking of replacing one of the drives (most likely the WD) with another silent 250GB one.
Do you guys know of any quite drives? Maybe I've got a monday morning drive and the WD's are quite? Samsung, Seagate…Maxtor?
Will making a 1:1 clone of the drive I'm going to replace work using dd? I'm not sure if it will correctly dublicated my boot drive (150GB OSX HFS+ + 80 GB Windows XP NTFS).
That's it for the noise. Maybe someone has any ideas, would be happy!
Now. Aiport. Is there any official word from apple? I haven't called them yet but it seems like pretty much everyone's getting bad performance from their airport card. With the access panel off I usually get 3 bars, when it's on usually 1-2 or even none. I've head that the actual antenna is at the bottom so i don't get why lifting the panel would make any difference.
I also read that the correct cables need to be connected to the aiport card. I can see three, label 1 2 and 3. 2 and 3 are connected to the airport card, 2 at the bottom. That correct? Do they even make a difference…my guess is not since the seem pretty much identical but who knows. I've seen some funny thing dealing with hardware.
Network performance on the MacPro is poor under OSX (got rid of the network drivers for XP cause it ain't supposed do get anywhere near the internet ;)).
Any ways to fix this?
Then there's the sound thingy with the linout and…nah. All of you know what i mean.
Other then that, the machine absoluetly screams. I'm a vfx artist so I totally profit from the 4 processors, and the thingy just feels speeeedy whatever it does. Congrats to Apple for such a nice computer…except for those pretty
basic faws.
Lennart
MacPro, iBook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Answer 1

I've got the same issue with the stock apple drive in slot 2. Nothing I've tried has gotten rid of the hum - I'm about to pull that drive and mount it in an external enclosure, as it's just a backup volume. Let us know if you come up with a good way of suppressing the vibration from drives in that slot.
Regarding quiet drives, I've got three Western Digital Caviar SE16 250 Gig drives, two of which are configured as a striped raid array for a scratch volume (primarily for video production). These are nice 7200 RPM SATA/300 drives that can be found for under $100 US, great performance and nearly silent. Some will recommend the more expensive WD Pro series (RE2) or Maxtor drives for RAID use (Hi, Ned!) - nice if you have the cash, but IMHO not altogether necessary for a workstation. If noise is a concern, these are great drives.