You may (or most likely to be fair may not) be aware of people who ‘mod’ their cases. It is all about modifying the case in some way (lights, graphics, paint jobs, knobs, fans, switches or any other customising paraphernalia) to make it individual. I suppose it is the computer equivalent of building a hot rod car, except that hot rods can at least be seen by other people on the road and not just by your geek mates at a LAN party.
The point of this is that I performed a mini mod on our Thecus storage box. The box is great at what it does, unfortunately it is also very whiny about it. It is a relatively small case, with two 320Gb disks spinning away generating heat, which Thecus chose to cool with a 4cm fan. The fan might be just enough to pull air through the case and keep everything cool enough (if 48C is considered cool enough) but it does this at around 4900RPM. The problem with 4900RPM is that it produces a very piercing whine when there are no other sounds around.
So I gave up yesterday and modded it to fit an 8cm fan to it. The case isn’t actually big enough to fit the fan into it so I have had to fit it externally using the tried and tested technique of cardboard and sticky tape (Frankenstein might now consider this box to be a friend of his).
Ignoring the looks of the thing the difference is unimaginable (4900RPM down to around 960RPM) on the noise front and it now pulls a lot more air through the case which does actually do some cooling. The additional cooling means that the disk is now running about 7C cooler than before which can only be a good thing.
Not got any photos yet but I’ll try and pop some up in a little while.