As you probably tell by the name, hard drive rubber grommets are rubber grommets that are specially designed to be used in computer builds as an addition to a hard drive. Many computer case manufacturers ship hard drive rubber grommets as an accessory to the case, so you can mount your hard drives in a much better way. As you know, rubber grommets are usually used to prevent damages and scratches to cables and wiring or as insulation. Furthermore, rubber grommets are used to cushion the vibrations made by certain products and that’s exactly what they do in this instance.Since hard drives don’t heat up that much, nor do they have any cabling near the sharp edges, the hard drive rubber grommets are used to make a hard drive run quietly, by cushioning the vibrations. Now, contrary to popular belief, you don’t have the need for a hard drive rubber grommet if you’re only installing a single hard drive in your unit. A single hard drive does not vibrate, nor works loud enough for you to use hard drive rubber grommets and in some instances using it could actually result in a louder operating HDD if the disk is screwed into the case too tightly or too loosely.

On the other hand, if you’re running multiple HDDs, for instance, NAS HDDs, you should absolutely use hard drive rubber grommets. In RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) configurations, that run multiple NAS HDDs, designed with continuous operations in mind and weeks on end read and write times, it’s important to use hard drive rubber grommets as the anti-vibration device. This would result in a much quieter and safer operation, considering that the excess vibrations could result in physical damages to your hard drives and possible server data loss.