forum.excito.org

Would anybody care to comment on which hard drives they've found to be the quietest and most appropriate to install inside a Bubba?

My first instinct was to go with Samsung, but I discovered that most of their offerings are SATA, not IDE! I wound up getting the Seagate ST3500641ARK which, like the Samsung, boasts a fluid main bearing for low noise, and indeed, it's quiet, though not completely silent. In my quiet apartment, it's audible as a soft white noise and not annoying. I think if I took the time to relocate it to a higher shelf, it would be almost negligible. I can't compare it directly to the Samsung Spinpoint in my PC because that hard drive is drowned out by the computer's cooling fans.

In the USA, this model is available at Circuit City stores.

We at excito has done a few comparisons in the past, and in almost all cases the Seagate Barracuda has proven to be the most quiet. Those are the ones we currently ship with Bubba.

We have also seen that smaller sizes (like the 80 GB Seagate Barracuda) are more quiet than larger ones.

I'm pretty happy with the Western Digital 320GB drive that I salvaged from a Buffalo NAS after it died.
Noise hasn't been noticeable and it's currently running at 40 C after 11 days uptime.

I think most newer gen. hd's (7200/5400 rmp) will be reasonably quiet; the lack of a case fan makes far more difference in my opinion. For instance, there is no comparison b/w my Buffalo Linkstation (w/ Samsung drive which is drowned out by the constant fan whir) and my Bubba, w/ 3x larger Barracuda drive.