Are there any of those?

I'm getting sick of the noises it makes when it's writing/reading stuff and would like to get a silent one.

Some reviews or even noise comparison charts would be awesome. My computer is otherwise rather silent and I'd like to get rid of at least most of the HDD noise I get.

Help is appreciated!

http://www.overclockers.com/tips454/
http://www.buildsilentpc.com/silen [...] rives.html
=D
But yeah, that coppled with a low RPM drive, possibly some dampeners and rubber and you can probably suit your needs.

http://www.storagereview.com/php/b [...] h_sort.php

But thats just idle noise.

Seagates used to be the quietest, but now its Samsung. Generally less platters are quieter than more, and many drives let you use a utility to toggle between quite mode and performance mode.

But you still need to look at benchmarks for individual drives.

Like AK said, rubber dampeners etc... will minimise 'case transfer vibration' (if you catch my drift)

In my experience Maxtor make real quiet drives. 7200rpm is pretty much the lowest you can get nowadays so I'm not sure how much volume there really is to save in that dept.

Samsung Spinpoints are the quietest drives. Seagate drives comes in as a close second.

As it has been mentioned before getting drives with only 1 or 2 platters will greatly reduce noise and heat. Seagate currently holds the title for having the densest platters available at 188GB per platter. A Seagate 160GB 7200.10 will have just one platter. A Seasgate 7200.10 300GB will have only two platters.

Some people who are fanatic about having very quiet drives will use 2.5" notebook hard drives instead of the 3.5" HDDs. But they cost more, and have slower throughput.

I think its been awhile since maxtor had the lead for quiet drives and some of the new Maxtors are as noisy as they come.

Again you will want to look at real tests results rather than assume anything from brand x are going to be quiter than anything from brand Y or Z.

You also need to determine whether you care about lowering the maximum acustic output or just keeping the idle noise down.

Personally I hate hearing a drive spin, but can easliy tollerate a hard drives "working" noises.

And you need to plan arround the loudest component in your system. You wouldn't want to bother with a Samsung if your videocard/CPU has a load fan.

I am happy if on a quiet morning I cannot hear if my system is on, when idle, at distance of about 7 ft.

Thanks for everyone's input!

Other components are quite quiet. No fan on the mobo, 120mm case fan, PSU fan is silent, CPU and GPU fans will rather soon be replaced by some silent ones.

Big thanks to jaguar's explanation.

I had two PATA drives and two SATA drives running in the same machine for a while and I could always tell when I was accessing the PATA drives by the crunching sound with disk access. I noticed a huge noise difference just switching from PATA to SATA. I've used seagates, maxtors, and western digitals and IMO, western digital are the quietest. I am running nothing but WD's and I get more noise from the psu fan and nary a peep from the hard drives.

Yes, SSDs would be the most silent choice and I actually might consider one (for Windows and the programs, probably..and the swap file) when I buy my next computer..they're damn expensive currently anyway. Prices will hopefully drop though.

I have a SATA WD 160GB, but it makes those crunchy noises when I actually do something with it...of course, it's quite full, does that make a difference?

The drive shouldn't be too fragmented...

I don't have problems with the ambient noise from my Western Digitals. I don't even notice them until they spin down.

However, the read / write noise of my Raptor is quite loud, while the Caviar SE16 is quite silent. I wish the Raptor was as quiet as the Caviar.