Best Hard Drive and Enclosure for Music Server

I think you would have good luck with the aluminum enclosures from Other World Computing (http://macsales.com). They specialize in Macs, but their external drives will work with any computer, and you can spec out the HD inside the case (call them if you need a specific drive that is not listed).

I would choose a Seagate drive for the least drive noise. In my experience they are much quieter than those offered from other manufacturers. I know they sometimes get a bad rep, but all consumer level drives fail on occasion, and this is not unique to Seagate.

My WD green drives are very quiet. They are enterprise level so that may make a difference. They are also 5400rpm. I think that most 5400 rpm drives will have less noise than those running faster. For music the 5400rpm seems to work just fine for me. My Icy Dock enclosure has an adjustable fan speed. I keep it on the slowest speed. It is very hard to hear but with no music it can be detected. I placed the drive in a wooden box with an open back and what little noise it made was gone.

I'm running 2 Seagate USB drives, one is 1.5 Tb (main) and the other 2 Tb (backup). Total cost: about $300 or so.

They are in a small 12X12 room with my other equipment ( I need to post some updated pictures), attached to my laptop running Windows Media Server (with sharing enabled for remote access from Roku network players, one on my main system in the same room, and one on my other system upstairs).

They are not perfectly quiet but quiet enough to not be an issue during listening even in those tight quarters.

These drives were painless to set up, have been 100% reliable, and the scheduled back-up software included also works like a charm with very simple setup.

Highly recommended for an effective and painless experience overall.

I currently have the 1.5 Tb main drive about 1/4 to 1/3 full with several hundred Cds (about 75% of my collection) ripped in .wav lossless format (over 9000 individual tracks) so far.

My most common listening scenario these days is to listen to cuts from my collection available off the server in random play mode with the Rokus. What a great way to discover and rediscover perhaps otherwise hidden or forgotten gems in ones music collection!

Dmailer: You are probably right about 5400 rpm drives being quieter. Also, I really doubt that you would see any problems in music from a 5400 rpm drive. Common interfaces for external drives (USB and Firewire) may not be able keep up with the read speed on a single file (like a song) of modern SATA drives even with the slower 5400 rpm spindle speed. This means that there would probably be no performance penalty for the 5400 rpm drive for this use. E-SATA interfaces can outpace some slower drives, but this level of performance is not necessary for playing music files, even at very high resolutions.

I believe that the aluminum enclosures from Other World Computing that I recommend above do not have fans, which would make them very quiet. They normally don't sell them with 5400 rpm drives, but you could get them to install one, or buy just the enclosure and do it yourself.