looking for a silent Blu-Ray ROM

[Freeco]

It seems ODD noise is very often forgotten in all reviews around the web.
I'm looking for a silent Blu-Ray ROM to install in a HTPC. Read speeds and access times aren't that important to me compared to read quality and operational spin noise.

Is there an owner around here of a recent & silent Blu-Ray reader?

[Cryoburner]

While I don't own a BD-ROM drive, my suggestion would be to go with one that's relatively slow. A 4x BD-ROM is bound to be a lot quieter than an 8x model. Granted, many drives slow themselves down to varying degrees while streaming video or audio, but a slower drive is almost guaranteed to be quieter no matter what you're using it for. A 4x BD-ROM drive will usually be limited to around 8X DVD-ROM and 32x CD-ROM speeds as well. The downside will be that ripping data or installing software from the drive will be a bit slower, but at least it should be quieter. As an added bonus, a 4x drive should cost a bit less than faster models. ; )

[Freeco]

well, in the meantime I have my eye on the Lite-On IHOS104.
I don't have any facts about the noise it makes, but somebody pointed me to the general Lite-On feature called Smart-X: it slows the speed down to what the application needs. (could be other brands have a similar feature though)
But as you say: it's a 4x, so spinning pretty slow, DVD @ 8x. It's also the cheapest I can get my hands on

And... there's always Nero DriveSpeed to further slow down the drive.
Ripping I won't do from the HTPC, and all my software and other stuff is on a NAS so installations are done over my gigabit network.

[themaster1]

Nero drive speed does the work well enough for me, except for cds, oddly, for dvds & bds it's perfect.

I don't think there are many good new bd players nowadays without high speeds capabilities you might look out for the first players commercialised, just a thought.

[Freeco]

I've been using that Lite-on drive for a while now and I'm very pleased about it. It's not noisy at all. I have to go very very close to the HTPC to be able to hear it, but in practice that won't be the case at all as there will always be enough ambiant noise to muffle the ODD.

BTW: Nero DriveSpeed doesn't work well under Windows 7. It seems only to work with CD's, not DVD or BD. Guess that software is simply to old (2003/2004?)
I've tried 3 other softwares (can't remember the names) and found that CDslow 4 works quite well.

[Koiwai]

I also own the LiteOn iHOS 104, and I'm very pleased with it. It's very quiet and stays reasonably cool even after extensive usage. I bought it on the spur of the moment because it was the cheapest I could find, but it turned out to be a good buy.

To qualify, by "very quiet" I mean I can't hear it over the noise of my system, coming mainly from the Antec EarthWatts 350 PSU, while playing a BD- or DVD-Video. Even copying data from a DVD at an admittedly slow 8x isn't really noisy.

Read quality is hard to say for me. I've done a fair amount of copying DVDs recently, including some ancient recordable DVDs. The only DVD the LiteOn was not able to read was also unreadable to the DVD-writers in my other PC, both of which have exceptionally good error correction according to their reviews. I haven't had any other problems with any media. This isn't really a proper verification of the drive's read quality, but I think it should at least not give you any headaches.

A minor point I like is that it's very fast to accept an inserted DVD, meaning you can play a DVD as soon as you insert it. I noticed this because my other drives take ages (= many seconds) to react to an inserted DVD, and I had sort of accepted it as unavoidable.

Hope that helps.