external hard drives creating noise

[Foreverain4]

hey all! i am running a pc with a gadget labs wave pro 8/24 soundcard. i just bought 3 ACOMdATA 60 gig external harddrives. these drives, for some reason, are creating a subtle high end feedback like sqeal in my sound card. anybody have any idea why or what to do?

[Hawking]

Sounds to me like you're picking up some of the fire wire signal. You might try rerouting some cabling. Using unbalanced audio connections, depending on their length, can and will introduce unwanted noise into the signal chain also. Something else I've learned from the good old days of analog gear is to be wary of what you plug in where. Noise can travel throughout the house/studio electrical wiring as well as audio wiring. If your new drives have typical 'wall-wart' power supplies, try plugging them into an outlet on the other side of the room. Perhaps the best way to narrow it down would be to reproduce the noise you're hearing and start moving things around. If you hear a change in the noise when you move wire X away from wire Y....you get the picture. Good luck.

[Justin]

You may have jostled some of your cables installing the hard drives.

I've had the same thing happen when my sound card cable was running next to my monitor cable or my power cables.

If it's coming from the FW cables. Try moving the sound card to a PCI slot on the opposite end of the chassis from the firewire card. Also check the little cable that runs from your cd-rom to sound card. It might be picking up interference from the Firewire card or a fan or somesuch. If it's dangling around there, try directing it elsewhere with some doublesided tape or a plastic wire tie.