Silent external hardrive?

[markot86]

Are there any silent or VERY quiet external hardrives out there?

 

[TheSloth]

The quietest HD type (that has reasonable capacity and price) is the 2.5in notebook type. You can buy these in external FW/USB enclosures, or buy the disk and enclosure seperately and put it together yourself.

Solid state storage is obviously silent, however is very limited in it's capacity (in the low single digit GB range). 1 and 1.5in HD's as used in iPods and the like are probably even quieter than the 2.5in disks, but are expensive and there are no purpose built external enclosures for these that I know of (unless you count an iPod itself).

No hard disk will ever be silent, as it is a mechanical device with multiple moving parts. As long as you account for heat dissipation howeve, you could custom mount one of those 2.5in external enclosures inside a further acoustically dead enclosure.

 

[thomaspf]

Quote:

No hard disk will ever be silent, as it is a mechanical device with multiple moving parts.

True but this is also true for a CD player. Even amplifers can have a certain level of hum from the transformers. A well insulated notebook drive is not noisier than this.

Cheers

Thomas

 

[nysulli]

my lab has 5 lacie portable drives, can't ever hear them, probably the cheapest usb powered external HD you can pick up to boot

 

[markot86]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nysulli my lab has 5 lacie portable drives, can't ever hear them, probably the cheapest usb powered external HD you can pick up to boot

I was actually looking at that one. Thank you very much for the imput =P