Quietest 500GB Firewire drive?

Simpletech Pro Drive, 1TB. Use it with my IMac, quiet, beautiful, efficient, inexpensive.

Don't like it? Take it back to Best Buy.

If you are looking at SATA drives, I like Western Digital Caviar drives and put them in ICY DOCK Firewire enclosures. These WD drives are very quiet because they have variable rotational speed. The drive should be more than sufficient for an audio bitrate. The ICY DOCK enclosures seem to be very good and you can get Firewire 800 and USB2 and eSATA.

I recommend several full low level format of any new drive. This will cause every block on the drive to be read and written, sparing out any bad blocks. Also helps as a "burn-in" process, to make sure your drive does not die on you when you reach a certain spot on the drive. Anything you can do that will cause repeated reads and writes to the entire drive over an extended period of time (a few days to a month), will tend to weed out bad drives.

Western Digital Caviar Link.

Another vote for 2.5" drives in external enclosures. They are dead silent, use very little electricity and produce virtually no heat. I use a couple of 500GB drives hanging off of my music server. I like them so much, I'm in the process of swapping out the 3.5" drives in my desktop machine.

Prpixel, which 2.5 inch 500Gb drive do you use? G.

I just ordered a 2TB WD my book studio to replace a stack of 6 Lacie drives I am using now. I have been searching all over the net trying to decide what to get. From the data I gathered the Drobo looked very interesting, but was to noisy to consider. I don't really hear my 6 stacked drives at all in my system now and I'm hoping with fingers crossed that the WD drive will be as good in that regard and hopefully better in the reliability.