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Does anyone know if there is an internal PCI-express card on the market with SATA-connections where you could put your old 3.5'' HDDs ?
There are a lot of SSDs on the market for this purpose, but I have some special needs.. :-)

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Dani AI

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— following your thread and ’s comments, a few practical points and low-risk options.

Mounting a 3.5" drive off a PCIe card is mechanically risky: the PCIe connector and PCB aren’t designed to bear the weight and torque of a full‑size desktop drive long term. That’s why there are few (if any) commercial PCI‑slot solutions for 3.5" disks. If the goal is quieter operation rather than a novelty mount, there are safer, more effective approaches.

Try this order of operations:

  • Diagnose first: check drive health and activity with sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX, identify heavy I/O with sudo iostat -xd 1 or sudo iotop, and confirm which devices are rotational with lsblk -o NAME,ROTA,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT. A failing bearing or constant background I/O is often the real culprit.
  • Low‑effort fixes: fit rubber grommets or silicone washers between drive and cage, enable smarter fan control (BIOS or lm‑sensors + fancontrol), and tidy cables so they don’t vibrate. These reduce transmitted vibration and usually give the best noise reduction per dollar.
  • Move the noise away: an external 3.5" USB3/eSATA enclosure or dock isolates the drive from the chassis and is cheaper than multiple large SSDs.
  • If you must have many drives on PCIe logically, use a proper HBA + external JBOD/drive enclosure (hot‑swap trays) so drives sit in purpose‑built bays instead of hanging off a PCI slot.

If you experiment with APM/spindown (hdparm -B / -S), do so cautiously — frequent spin‑ups can shorten some drives’ life. Given your setup, start with SMART/IO checks, try vibration mounts, then consider an external enclosure or JBOD if noise is still unacceptable.

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Member Avatar for it@61@sec

There are a lot of PCI-e cards with SATA-connections, but none of them seems to hold the 3.5'' drives.
And that is (ufortunately) what I want right now... :-(

Member Avatar for rproffitt

So it must "hold" the 3.5? The 3.5 in such systems is usually mounted to the case since the weight of an average 3.5 HDD is such that, well, that's not a good idea. Time to hit your workbench and make a bracket?

Member Avatar for it@61@sec

You have a point...
Maybe I should reject the whole idea and use the 3.5'' HDD as they are today.
I just wonder if there was any solution to this "problem" somewhere...

Member Avatar for rproffitt

I think the solution is to make a bracket for your unique system. I see that the normal PCIe connection is x1 so the strain on the PCB would be too high for a commercial off the shelf board. Now that you can't count on the lenght of the board to be exactly a number of mm, it's back to your shop bench to cut your mount to just the right size.

Member Avatar for it@61@sec

Well, it's not that important... I won't use my time (and money) to create a unique solution "all by myself".
So if there's no off-the-shelf solution available I think I rather drop it and use the built-in brackets in my PC case.
(The idea was that by mounting the HDD on a PCI-e expansion card the noise from the HDD would be lower than by using the mounting brackets in the PC chassis itself. But I might be wrong on that as well...).

I have built a new desktop machine running Ubuntu 15.10 (Cinnamon/GNOME desktop) with the following spec:
(Tried to use Linux Mint 17.3, but it had no support for Skylake Graphics out-of-the box).

  • Fractal Design Core 2500 Midi Tower chassis (it's a nice one..)
  • MSI H170A PC MATE motherboard
  • Intel Core i5-6400 Skylake (Quad core, 2.7 GHz)
  • 32 GB RAM (will be expanded to 64GB as soon as I can afford it.. :-) )
  • 250 GB Samsung EVO SSD
  • 2 x 3TB HDD (Toshiba and Seagate Barracuda)
  • 550W PSU (Cooler Master G550M)

Obviously when I removed the HDDs the system was practially noiseless, but when adding the HDDs it was not noiseless anymore... :-(
The noise is by no means very disturbing, but compared to a system with only SSD-disk(s) it's noticeably.
At this point I was wondering if it was possible to put the HDDs on an PCI-express card (with SATA-connections).

(Sorry if my English/American language is not perfect. It's not my mother tongue...)

Edited by it@61@sec
Member Avatar for rproffitt

This just in. I spotted a 480GB SSD for 99.99 USD so that would be noise free and a lot faster.

Found the PCIe HDD mount at but not 3.5 inches. It appears that 3.5 inch drives exceed the mechanical dimensions for PCIe cards by too much.

Member Avatar for it@61@sec

SSDs are practically noise free, but they are not cheap - especially if you want much storage ( > 2 TB).
I need the 6TB diskspace, but can't afford to buy 3 x 2TB SSDs (as an example).. :-)
Thanks for your interest, anyway... :-)

Member Avatar for it@61@sec

I have been in the business for so long that I KNOW that content you don't have backup of will be lost - sooner or later.
Today I use one of my 3TB drives mainly for storing TV shows recorded from my satelite desktop box (and the disk is nearly full).
I can afford to lose that one.. :-)
The second one is used for storing downloads, documents, my e-mail archive for Thunderbird and other important stuff.
I'm going to backup it to different external HDDs and cloud storage. This is the important part for me..

So yes: I'm aware of the risks...
(and I should be as an CISSP..)

Edited by it@61@sec
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