SPCR

I'm currently building a HTPC. I don't see recommendations for optical drives on SPCR. Am I missing something? My current drive is quite noisy.

I have heard that Samsung optical drives are fairly quiet.

I have a very noisy Liteon CD burner but the Nero Drivespeed tool can be used to slow the read speed and eliminate almost all of the noise. Nero Drivespeed is freeware and the utility works with both CD and DVD drives. There is a Drivespeed manual in PDF format.

yes i have a samsung dvd-ram burner and its super quiet even when burning a cd at max speed

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6827151133

sorry what model number is that?

does it come in SATA?

For playback of DVDs and CDs just about any drive will be quiet enough. They get noisy when they speed up past 1x, which is what you're spinning at for media playback. I have 20x Samsungs in both SATA and PATA. They're the noisiest thing in my computers when reading and writing data at advanced speeds. I've yet to hear them in a media playback situation. I'm not sure of the model #s - I have whatever they were selling at Newegg a couple months back.

I had a problem with the SATA on an older ABit SG-80DC mobo. The bios would only recognize the drive every third or fourth boot, and even then Vista would sometimes lose the drive. I ended up swapping it with whatever PATA drive was in my Gateway AMD box and both systems have worked flawlessly.