Optical Drives

[Bookie]

Thanks to a lot of good information on this forum, I have converted my computers to be as silent as possible. The only thing left that I can hear is my optical drives, when they are being used. This really isn't that big of a problem, but since I've gone pyscho (my wife's word) trying to quiet everything else, why stop now.

Is there any drive on the market today that can be considered silent? I've though about putting in a <=8x drive, but I would have to give up a lot of speed that way. I'm not interested in trying to insulate my current drives but would rather just buy new ones that are quiet from the start.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Bookie]

I just did a little research on silentpcreview.com's forum and some people were suggesting either using a cd-rom limiter (keeps the drive running at a lower speed) or to use something like Alchohol 120% to create iso files and access my discs through iso files. This second idea sounds great to me since I just replaced all my drives with 120gb barracuda V drives and I have tons a free disk space, but I'm not sure that my Warcraft 3 disc will work since it supposedly has some sort of "watermark". Does anyone know anything about this or have any experience doing this? Alcohol 120% claims to be able to bypass all the latest "unbreakable" protections. I guess I may have to download the trial and test it out.

 

[dionx]

my tdk velocd 24x12x32x is way quieter compared to my lite-on 16x dvd-rom. everything from opening and closing the try to spinning the cds.

i would upgrade to another velocd but i cant find a black one to match my new case. they do have a black tdk cd-rw but its a 2nd edition only in asia

 

[chansen]

I've found the LG drives to be among the quietest. Despite reports to the contrary, my Pioneer slot-load DVD ROM is also reasonably quiet, and is among the fastest for providing you access to the disc just inserted.

 

[jarsoffart]

The discontinued Kenwood TrueX series should be fast but quiet because the rated speed is not the actual rotational speed because they use more than one laser beam to read data.

 

[Fallen Kell]

I thought the TrueX series spun the laser conter to the cd-rom, thus having two slower moving spins, but with the velocity difference between them being the only thing that matters.

 

[godmare]

No, the TrueX reads the disc in multiple places at once by splitting the laser into several parts. The disc spins slower, and the laser is stationary.

I didn't know they discontinued them ,though :Q

 

[Bookie]

Well, I actually just got a copy of Alcohol 120% and successfully created an image of Warcraft 3. I am now playing this game from the mounted image on my HDD. I think I'm just going to allocate about 50gigs of my drive to store all my images and chuck the use of the cd-rom/dvd in the future. I don't watch movies on my pc anyway so I think I've found the best solution for what I wanted.

-Thanks

 

[godmare]

Originally posted by: Bookie
Well, I actually just got a copy of Alcohol 120% and successfully created an image of Warcraft 3. I am now playing this game from the mounted image on my HDD. I think I'm just going to allocate about 50gigs of my drive to store all my images and chuck the use of the cd-rom/dvd in the future. I don't watch movies on my pc anyway so I think I've found the best solution for what I wanted.

-Thanks

Yeah, that's definitely a good way to go about it- provided you have the space Of course you should keep optical media backups of your games and images, etc., as hard drives to develop bad sectors and such