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"Quiet please"

In my ongoing quest to assemble a moderately powerful PC to be as quiet as possible (without moving it metres away), I need to find the quietest hard drive. Now, in general laptop HDs are quieter because of the lower spin speed, but how much quieter is it when compared to tne quietest desktop 3.5" HD? Is there noticeably less of the whine and clicks made by the HD, or is the difference negligible on a price-noise ratio?


*sorry if I'm making the post sound scientific, but my head is all fuzzy feeling at this moment.

Yeah, Silent Drives are the annoying ones by quietpc.com. I hear they trap heat and HD failures are very common with them.

I thought I did, but I actually knew where I could get a Silent Drive - which is not as good and unsuitable for faster HDs. Similar names: shouldn't be allowed. Seems to cost about $80 to get one shipped over from the US, so I'll keep looking.

Grr... I can't find any UK (or European distributors...only in the US. Does anyone know of any?

It's basically a box to stick your drive in, but it's soundproofed and dampens the noise coming out of it. You have to fit it in a 5.25" bay, I think. There's a review of it at www.silentpcreview.com. The link itself is huge, but it's under the Reccommended -> Reccomended Hard Drives section. Sounds quite good, but apparently the effect is more dramatic with louder drives like the Spinpoint.

I have the Samsung Spinpoint now, it's actually quite loud (by my standards anyway). It also chucks out a lot of heat...

What does the Smart Drive do, UK?

Turbonutter wrote:
> You want Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 drives. They have fluid bearings and
> are extremely quiet, seriously.
>
> I would choose the Maxtors disks over Barracudas anyday.

Got 2 of the DiamondMax Plus 9. 2 120Gb 133ATA 7200rpm 8mb cache.

I occasionally look at the forums at silentpcreview.com and the consensus seems to be: the Barracuda is quietest, the DiamondMax has the best performance with a little more noise, and the Samsung Spinpoint is also a good choice.

http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php has a bunch of benchmarks including idle noise.

They also reccommend sticking your hd in a Smart Drive, which isn't supposed to add much heat. I'm thinking of picking up one of those myself.

You want Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 drives. They have fluid bearings and are extremely quiet, seriously.

I would choose the Maxtors disks over Barracudas anyday.

From what I've heard, the difference between a vanilla HD and a 2.5" is pretty negligible unless you're using totally passive cooling. So on a price-noise-performance ratio (I added an extra factor) I would go for a Barracuda.

Seagate Barracudas come with fluid bearings, which makes them pretty noiseless.