Time to start Swinging

The X-Swing comes packed in a rather uninteresting box with German scrawled all over the back. The front of it shows the X-Swings in their full glory and the Noiseblocker logo.

Inside the packing, you find the ‘Swings themselves, a short multilingual manual, and a whole set of screws. There are enough screws to attach the X-Swing to your 5 1/4” bay, but only one set of screws to mount a hard disc, meaning that you can only use one HDD with the X-Swing if you don’t have any screws hanging around.

The X-Swings themselves look like bike parts as they are made of the ‘cool’ anodised aluminium that bikers lust. The angular lines and non-symmetrical design all add to this effect as well. Connected to the awkwardly shaped chassis of the X-Swing are two large black cylinders that house a socket that you screw the mounting screws into.

These cylinders look like they just shroud the screw hole, but the screw part, and the part that connects to the X-Swing itself only goes down about 3mm; the rest of the cylinder is rubber. That’s a lot of noise absorbing rubber.

The way that the X-Swing works is pretty simple. You attach the metal ‘frame’ part to your hard disc directly, and then screw into the rubber parts. The bit you screw into and the part that is connected to the frame is only held together with rubber. Essentially you give your hard discs rubber suspension allowing your hard disc to vibrate without the motion being passed onto the case.

Unfortunately, to get enough noise eating rubber between your case and the hard disc, you have to install the X-Swing into a 5 1/4” bay. This could be an issue to anyone who has a large quantity of hard discs and not many free 5 1/4” drive bays. However most cases have more free large bays than hard discs. Considering as you can mount two HDD’s per drive bay, there shouldn’t be a problem.

On the sides of the X-Swing there is the Noiseblocker logo and the ‘X-Swing’ product name. These are printed in white and look great, and will look even better when installed on your hard discs.

The X-Swing is meant to look good, even though it will barely been seen in your case once installed. That said, would you rather receive these, or a plain black one? I think the answer is obvious.