This is a pro­ject I’ve been work­ing on for the past quar­ter for my EE47 class. I didn’t want to make just a per­son­al mu­sic play­er, but in­stead a per­son­al mu­sic per­for­mance – and this is the more-or-less first pro­to­type of that. It could be de­scribed as a “vir­tu­al turntable”: you load songs in­to it, and then you can play them back as if they were on a record. You can slow down or speed up the record, or grab it and scratch it.

Read more about the de­tails of the im­ple­men­ta­tion on the class pro­ject page.

It doesn’t work.

Okay, that’s a lit­tle bit un­fair; it’s prob­a­bly more ac­cu­rate to say that it doesn’t work as ex­pect­ed. The Tu­niq Sanc­tum hard drive en­clo­sure is a 5.25″ bay de­vice that holds a 3.5″ (or small­er, I sup­pose) hard drive, and pur­port­ed­ly not on­ly re­duces the noise out­put of the drive but al­so helps to keep it cool. This de­vice, un­for­tu­nate­ly, ex­cels at one aspect of its claimed pur­pose and fails at the other. While it does in­deed keep noise levels down very ac­cept­ably, the Tu­niq Sanc­tum en­clo­sure, due to the lack of air­flow in­side the de­vice, fails to cool the hard drive ad­e­quate­ly. In fact, leav­ing the hard drive in­side the en­clo­sure will prob­a­bly de­crease the hard drive’s life­time due to the 60+ de­grees Cel­sius tem­per­a­tures some­times ex­pe­ri­enced in­side the de­vice.

There are other prob­lems with the Sanc­tum. Ca­bles pass­ing in­to the de­vice to con­nect to the hard drive, as seen here, are ob­struct­ed by a piece of foam at the back of the de­vice. The foam puts pres­sure on the ca­bles, which could be dev­as­tat­ing for weak­er con­nec­tors like SA­TA ca­bles. The in­dents you can see above are caused by the wires push­ing down on the foam.

When in­stalling the hard drive in­to the Sanc­tum, one is sup­posed to at­tach two “ther­mal pads” to the hard drive. (The­se pads can be seen in the first pho­to.) The pads sup­pos­ed­ly con­duct heat away from the drive to the alu­minum fins on the out­side. I didn’t at­tach them dur­ing my in­stal­la­tion, be­cause they would have forced me to con­tin­ue us­ing the Sanc­tum with that drive for all eter­ni­ty – the pads would make the drive thick­er than an or­di­nary 3.5″ bay. I don’t think the pads can do much to af­fect the ther­mals any­way, as foam (no mat­ter how “ther­mal”) can nev­er be a re­al­ly good heat con­duc­tor.

To con­clude, the Tu­niq Sanc­tum is prob­a­bly not worth the money. While it keeps the noise of the hard drive down, its in­abil­i­ty to cool the drive ad­e­quate­ly makes it ba­si­cal­ly use­less to any­one want­ing high per­for­mance or longevi­ty from their drive. For new builders, the money spent on this en­clo­sure would be bet­ter put to­ward a qui­eter or cool­er-run­ning hard drive.