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Quiet hard drive

From what I can tell, it's been quite some time since anyone's asked for external hard drive recommendations. My current drive seems perhaps a bit shaky (yes, it's backed up), and I'll soon be replacing it. I want what everyone wants: quiet, reliable, large enough. Any favorite brands -- or ones to avoid?
The drive is attached to a Mac Mini, with my CD collection (slightly less than 1,000 discs) stored in Apple Lossless. Thanks for your recommendations.
-- Howard
hodu
rushton's avatar
rushton
2,445 posts
 
The Western Digital Caviar Green series in 1T, 1.5T and 2T sizes are very quiet (Idle Noise 24 dB; Seek Noise 29 dB). Install in an external drive case of your choice.

Quieter than this, look for 2.5" laptop form factor drives or SSD drives, but the capacity goes way down.
almarg's avatar
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almarg
9,670 posts
 
Hi Howard,

If you haven't already seen it, you'll find this thread to be of interest:

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?icomp&1295832104

Regards,
-- Al
albertporter's avatar
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albertporter
4,949 posts
 
Hodu,

If your music is important to you sonically, beyond just the drive being quiet, solid state hard drives sound significantly better.

Right now they are still very expensive, probably several hundred dollars for 250 - 500 GB but prices are falling.
cwlondon
1,210 posts
 

Albertporter,

You make an interesting point as intuitively, it always seemed to me that a SSD might somehow have an advantage over a more mechanical traditional drive.

As audiophiles are not known for balking at high prices, could you give any more insight into how the sound might differ from a traditional hard drive?
pkubica
134 posts
 
As was mentioned earlier, the Cavier Green drives are very quiet and also very cool (low power usage). They are slower than the regular drives. The solid state drives work very well especially as bootable drives. My system comes up 3-4 times faster with the SSD.

As far as sound, memory is cheap so why bother playing from any hard drive. Have the track load to memory and play from there. I use 8GB of system memory which eliminates HD signatures.
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