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Until solid state storage costs drop to levels affordable for mere mortals, hard drives will remain the noise floor that keeps us from reaching the holy silent PC grail of no moving parts and no noise. Advances in the implementation of heatpipes and heatsinks have shown us the way to fanless cooling -- of CPUs, VGA cards, PSUs etc.
But there's no escape from the spinning of a hard drive. The noise floor for desktop hard drives is probably the newest 5400 rpm Samsungs, which I have heard are quieter than even the Seagate Barracuda IV single platter drive, of which I still have many.
I had a couple of recent - brief - experiences with a Fujitsu notebook drive and a Seagate Momentus 40G 5400 rpm 8mb cache drive that quite shocked me. They are at another level of noise BELOW the quietest desktop drives I've used. I am guessing that the low moving mass combined with advances in bearing & head design are responsible for the amazingly low noise.
The Fujitsu is in a M-ITX system I will soon be posting a review of. The system is fanless; its only moving part is the HDD. It was on a tall stool next to where I was seated, maybe 2~3' away from my head when I first powered it up. I could not tell right away whether it was on -- I did the stereotypical move of checking for lights to see if it was on. The only other noise was from my main PC 4' away under my desk (~20 dBA/1m). This is by far the quietest system I've ever heard. If my quietest PC is 16 dBA/1m, this thing is below 10. There is no way I can measure the SPL -- except maybe at under 12" in an anechoic chamber with a zero dB ambient. Only when the HDD is in seek can I hear it -- even while holding it in my lap! (I don't know exactly how the HDD is mounted in the system as I have not opened it up yet.)
The Seagate Momentus , listened to bare, does not exhibit quite the same level of quiet, but it is quieter than any 3.5" drive in my stable, with considerably less vibration. It stands to reason: Lower moving mass, smaller diameter platters. With a little creativity, I think we (the SPCR community) could find good ways to really silence such notebook drives. And the 5400 rpm speed with 8mb cache in the Momentus holds promise that the performance hit will be much less than we expect.
Look for more on notebook drives in the near future. I expect a notebook drive in a small desktop will be in my future soon.
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