I can't believe the Maxtor DM10's are not on the list - I have four of these drives - 2 x 300gb SATA, 1 x 250gb SATA and 1 x 250gb IDE, and all of them are very, very silent. This is in comparison to the 160gb Samsung (SATA, NIDEC), which I also own!

Without a question, the Maxtor DM10. I have two 300GB and one 250GB and (without resorting to anal measurement techniques) they all run just as silently as my Samsung 160GB NIDEC, one of the benchmarks for silent drives. They are very fast too.

A little bit of airflow does wonders for keeping drive temperaure down. Most cases have room for an 80mm intake fan over the HDD drive bays - use it. If you volt down any decent fan, it shouldn't add any more noise than your curent level.

I have both the 1614C NIDEC and the DM10 300gb. Get the Maxtor, no question about it. Just as quiet and VERY fast. Maxtor idles a bit quieter but has slightly more audible seeks.

The Maxtor is designated the boot drive, and I see both in BIOS. Both drives can run together with no problem if I disconnect the CD-RW. I'm going to check right now if I can set a delayed spin-up.... is there any point in changing to different wire harnesses if they're all powered from the same 5/1...

I just bought a new hard drive (Maxtor Diamondmax 10, 300gb) and my system refuses to power-up with the new drive installed. I have a Seasonic Super Tornado 300w, and my system is as follows: Asus P4P800-VM Intel P4-2.4B / Zalman 7000 1 x 512mb RAM Radeon 9550 (fanless, no power connector) Samsung 1...

EDIT: Oh, I see the problem. If I have X as 15,000 observations X'X is going to be 15000x15000 matrix of doubles... wow, that's going to be huge... Hmmm, maybe 4 gigs of ram is going to be the way then. If you're referring to X your regression matrix it usually has #columns = number of predictors a...

External drives are messy. Power supplies, USB / Firewire cables everywhere. Plus they are not particularly fast (most 7200rpm drives have sustained write speeds exceeding Firewire 400's bandwidth). When you're backing up hundreds of gigs of data, speed matters.... Why not just buy a removable HDD t...

Or even the 7200.8's. I'm in dire need of more storage/backup space and my patience is wearing thin....

EasyRaider, Don't be discouraged. You can indeed get VERY good sound from a PC. You need to start with a solid sound card. The top two in the market that are reasonably priced are the Lynx L22 and RME Digi96/8 PAD. These cards are made with the noisy PC environment in mind and so are pretty well shi...

Yeah, my 160GB SATA (1614C) is driving me nuts too. Very loud (at least compared to what I was expecting) high-pitched whine at idle. On the bright side, there is almost no seek noise on top of this.... Doesn't seem to vibrate much, so I doubt suspension is going to help very much. I have it sitting...

What fans are recommended for the Zalman? The consensus seems to be Paflow L1A or Papst? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's NOT a good idea to put a thermistor-controlled fan like some of the Silenx or Acoustifan's... right? Since the Zalman PSU already reduces the voltage of the fan depending on tem...

I have a 300B and the fan *is* soldered on to the circuit board.