Originally posted by: Patt
Is it just me, or should the question posed back to the OP be "For what reason do you need a really quiet drive?" Do you honestly use it that much for it to make such a difference?
I've spent a fair amount of time building my system so that it's dead quiet (or 'quite' for PC_Freak) including mounting 120mm fans with rheostats to slow them, and mounting everything on rubber gromets, plus of course replacing chipset & GPU fans with chunky heatsinks. I've also bought decent hard drives which make no noticable sound (Seagate Barracuda: very good) and a silent PSU & a zalman CPU heatsink. The machine is very quiet indeed now and is great for working.
The problem I do have, however, are my optical drives which when they spin up are noisy as hell. I'd really like to find some drives that were quiet, although it is true that they don't spin up too too often. Is is very distracting when they do, however, especially when the mahcine starts up and they both have disks in them...