Friday, June 10, 2005

A quieter pc - some easy steps

Easy Steps for a Quiet PC

Yes, WD drives sure are noisy ...
Hard Drives

Hard drives are constantly rotating at extremely high RPMs....

If you care about noise, then that 10K or 15K RPM screamer is just out. Instead, you'll want to look at a quiet 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM hard drive with some kind of acoustic management and fluid drive bearings. The reference quiet hard drives are the older Seagate Barracuda IV and V models. I've seen comments that the newer 7200.7 models aren't as quiet, but I don't know if that means "these are loud" or if it just means "they're not perfect". The current king of high-capacity drives with good, quiet performance are the newer Samsung SpinPoints. I have a mix of Samsungs and Barracudas and I'm happy with both of them. I also have a newer Maxtor model with fluid drive bearings, and while not silent, it's definitely better than the older Maxtor I used to have. The only manufacturer I adamantly refuse to use is Western Digital -- their drives are just painfully noisy.

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