Ultra quiet hard disk for iMac?

[Bacci]

After adding a 256GB SSD, my iMac becomes completely silent when the 2GB stock drive spins down. When it fires up again, I now get annoyed by the noise it makes.

If you know about any super silent hard drives (1TB or more) to replace the noisy stock drive, I would appreciate it!

The drive only holds documents, so speed is of no concern.

 

[Mike in Kansas]

After adding a 256GB SSD, my iMac becomes completely silent when the 2GB stock drive spins down. When it fires up again, I now get annoyed by the noise it makes.

If you know about any super silent hard drives (1TB or more) to replace the noisy stock drive, I would appreciate it!

The drive only holds documents, so speed is of no concern.

You could keep it spinning all of the time. I have done that as I moved a lot of my content from my internal HDD to an external FW800 drive as I replaced my large internal HDD with an SSD. When I would launch an app that touched content on my external drive, I'd have to wait for the drive to spin back up before the app would fully launch, and I'd get beach-balling. Nothing I did in the Power settings would keep the drive from ultimately spinning down; I believe it was embedded into the drive's firmware.

There's an applet called "keepdrivespinning" that puts a file on the drives that you select and then goes and "touches" that file with some set frequency. The default frequency is 60 seconds but you can make it whatever you want. Since most of the noise is from the drive spinning up or down, keeping it spinning may make for a better "sound" experience. You won't eliminate the noise from the read/write heads indexing across the drive, but it won't sound like an airplane taking off either.

Here's a link:

http://jon.stovell.info/personal/Software.html

 

[Slow Programmer]

Consider a 2 1/2 inch drive. They tend to have less noise issues. Just put it into a 3 1/2 adaptor.