As the post title states, I'm thinking of ways to further reduce noise in my NAS build, and from most of the posts I see, I've taken most basic steps, and during my day-to-day it's honestly not that bad. But when the drives are doing some serious work, I'm wondering if there is anything I can do to dampen it a bit further, and the one I thought of was if anyone had tried putting a cushioning grommet between the backplane and the frame of the case. Because currently it seems like the drive couples directly to the case via the backplane, which is why some of the sound travels through the case.
I'm curious if anyone with this case has attempted what I'm thinking though, which would be to get some rubber grommets and fit them between the backplane and the case, so the HDDs would be floating on rubber mounts, and the backplane would as well, so the physical connection between HDD and backplane doesn't directly connect to the case.
As an extremely rough proof of concept, I suppose one could test this by merely removing the mounting screws temporarily and seeing if the noise was reduced by having a floating backplane.