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Quietest laptop hard drive
Posted: Fri Aug 30, 2002 1:45 am
by Jake
My ears are extremely susceptible to any noise, and it drives me crazy. On my Sony Vaio PCG-C1VE laptop, because it has a Transmeta Crusoe which is fanless most the time, the only noise comes from the 12GB Fujitsu hard drive. And its loud, by my standards at least.
Does anyone know what the quietest laptop hard drive is? Also, just how much noisier are 5400 over 4500rpm drives? The current one is 4500rpm, and is way too noisy.
Posted: Fri Aug 30, 2002 9:44 am
by davidhooper
I've got the C1XN, the product just behind yours. It has a 700Mhz-ish Celeron. AFAIK, the hdd is soldered in on these VAIOs and can't be replaced, although I may be corrected by someone who knows better?
Posted: Sat Aug 31, 2002 3:03 am
by Jake
I'm sure it's not because I've heard of people changing them before (see
http://www.farstand.com/cgi-bin/pcg-c1/Forum.exe for example). It is hard to replace though, and requires a lot of patience and care.
Posted: Sun Sep 01, 2002 1:43 am
by yunez
rotational speed is not the only factor in noise output. The seagate barracuda IVs run at 7200rpm, but because of their fluid bearings they are apparently virtually silent.
Posted: Mon Sep 02, 2002 5:41 pm
by Steerpike
Different laptops handle the hard drive differently. Dell latitudes, for example, hold the HD in a slide-out caddy that is released by removing one or two screws. Under the covers, though, they seem to be pretty similar in form factor - they use various 'adapters' to adapt the base HD to their caddy/electrical connectors. Recently, the form factor seems to have shrunk - the latest 20 gig drives we see at work are remarkably small; smaller than the small ones we saw a year ago! I saw that CompUSA now sells laptop HDs yesterday (in Vacaville, CA).
BE AWARE that the same model of laptop will use DIFFERENT Hard Drives! I'm the IT guy for our company, and we recently bought 10 'identical' latitudes (C610). Some had Hitachi 20 gig HDs, some had IBM 20 gig HDs. Just depends (presumably) on who's got what stock at what price at the time!
The IBMs are NOISY; the Hitachi's are quiet. One IBM has failed already. When we called in the fault on the IBM, they shipped us out a Hitachi - again, depends on what spares they have on hand.