A silent external HD?

The reviews at Silent PC Review are worth a look. For quiet, I've been consistently happy with Samsung P80 drives, but you'll want to check the specs on individual models because it's not as simple as "brand X is quieter than brand Y". Combine with a fanless enclosure that includes rubber internal mounts.

In exchange for quiet, you often will sacrifice some seek speed. That's iffy for any kind of media streaming, but you can compensate by wiping the drive before you begin. Notebook (2.5") drives are quieter than desktops (3.5"), but with higher cost and a larger speed penalty.

If you are going to be using it on a daily basis, best to get an enclosure with a fan. As the enclosures w/o a fan will just lead to heat and early hard drive failure. I've found that Glyph drives are the best out there. They have a fan, but are super quiet also. They are made to be near silent.

Firewire. They have models with FW800 also, but it gets pricey.

http://www.glyphtech.com/site/index.html

http://www.sweetwater.com/store/closeup/GT050Quad250--rear.jpg

scottlinux said:

If you are going to be using it on a daily basis, best to get an enclosure with a fan. As the enclosures w/o a fan will just lead to heat and early hard drive failure.

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Do you have any reputable data at all to back up that claim? I've found fan failure to be a major source of drive and enclosure failure.

iMeowbot said:

Do you have any reputable data at all to back up that claim? I've found fan failure to be a major source of drive and enclosure failure.

Click to expand...

What? Well, heat = failure for hard drives. This is common sense. So if the fan fails, then I guess the drive would overheat and fail.

Any hard drive needs to operate at a proper temp. This goes for a drive inside your case as well as an external drive. A fan cooling the hard drive will keep it at an appropriate operating temp so it will not fail, and is pretty much a requirement if you are going to use a drive for heavy reading/writing on a daily basis.

And the fan in a Glyph enclosure is not going to fail, btw. Glyph hard drives are the industry standard for both audio production and video. They are the only firewire drives officially certified for use by Pro Tools, and are used in every major studio in the US. This is not some cheap little external enclosure from wal-mart.

Here is the blurb from Pro Tools:

http://www.digidesign.com/index.cfm?navid=54&itemid=23114

"Please Note:

* Hard drives using the Oxford 924 chipset interface have FW800, FW400, USB 2.0, and eSATA ports on them. (In our testing, Digidesign qualified Glyph GT Series Hard Drives with the Oxford 924 chipset)"

Or read on the Glyph website for more info about their drives.

The noise difference between 3.5 and 2.5 is major, and extended read/write operations generate much less heat (requiring less cooling in an array which will recover some of the lost I/O speed).

Just thought I'd throw that in there.

The G-Drives are great and are silent for the most part. They use a Hitachi drive that actually has some nice numbers in terms of speed and reliability. The Glyph drive is excellent and uses Seagate drives primarily.

I wouldn't feel bad about getting the G-Drive at all.