HD noise distracting

[urlwolf]

Hi,

Am I the only one who fids HD noise distracting?

listening to umpredictable clicks every second or so it's not good for concentration (closer to torture).

I'm using a laptop in a vertical position that makes the hd really close to my ear level, but in general with laptops solutions like getting a better case or moving the box to another location are discarded.

Do you have any idea how to tackle this?

Thanks a lot

[nudone]

earplugs.

hard drive noise drives me insane. i went crazy a few months ago and bought all the 'quiet' kit i could afford. so, two samsung spinpoints (meant to be super quiet) and two raptor drives (quiet spinning but super loud clicking).

all well and good, but now after only about 7 months the samsung(s) have started making a very irritating high pitch noise - whenever they so choose to do so. fantastic.

so, all i can see is you can have the most silent machine in the world, fanless, water cooled, whatever. but what can you do about hard drive noise when the noise comes from inside the drive case - nothing.

only solution i can think of is to put the hard drives away from where you are sitting. you can't really put modern machines in a cupboard because of the heat they'll produce so it looks like it requires putting the machine in another room with cables running through the walls. absolutely ridiculous measures just to have a silent hard drive. and no, a hard drive case enclosure won't help - i've got those already and the high pitch noise easily escapes through them.

so use earplugs or background music - or maybe just go back to have noisy fans.

sorry, that's not really answering your question, i've just accepted that hard drives are swines. thankfully, only a few more years to go and hard drives will be obsolete.

[f0dder]

Solid-state drives

Perhaps a smallish solid-state drive, large enough to install windows on... then gigabit networking, and a fileserver in another room.

[JavaJones]

For a truly silent system, no HD's, check this out: http://inventgeek.com/Projects/IonCooler/Overview.aspx ; A tad expensive for solid state solution, and power outtages could be an issue.

- Oshyan

[f0dder]

Christ, 2x4GB iRAM in stripe. Bastards. I'd prefer one of the newer solid-state disks, though.

[mitzevo]

Well my laptop honestly sounds like a vacumm.. I want to get rid of it...
it's a pcg-k33 any one wanna buy? lol

it also acts like a heater.. it pumps out so much hot air 

[JavaJones]

Which newer solid-state disks are those and what are the access times and transfer rates?

- Oshyan

[f0dder]

Which newer solid-state disks are those and what are the access times and transfer rates?

Haven't seen any benchmarks, but this is the one I was thinking about. I also think somebody mentioned it here at DC not too long ago. Well, there's an italian article that I butchered up with babelfish, as far as I can tell we're speaking 50MB/s xfer rates, and insanely low access/seek time. And a pricetag of $950 >_<

[JavaJones]

Oho, nice! I hadn't expected anything that good given the performance of other devices based on similar tech. I wonder if the improvement is due to parallelization or something. Anyway pricey, but it seems like it might be to a reasonable level even within a year or so, which is awesome. Especially for people like a friend of mine who are extremely sensitive to noise.

- Oshyan

[f0dder]

Much less noise, much faster speed (fragmentation basically becomes irrelevant), less heat, less power consumption, no chance of mechanical failures. I wouldn't mind one of those for my primary drive (windows + apps + source/documents + a few games), then move everything else to a NAS or DAS(?).

[JavaJones]

Yeah, I hope these come down in price (and go up in size) soon! I wonder though, what of the normal NAND read/write cycle limitations? Isn't it usually something like 1000? Or am I thinking of a similar but not identical tech? I'm sure they must have accounted for this...

Actually, it sounds like pricing isn't that bad. For a 16GB array it's a little over a $500 premium in Japan for a Sony laptop. Hopefully it'll be popular and come down fast.
http://www.engadget.com/search/?q=ssd

- Oshyan

[f0dder]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory says that the write cycle is probably around 1million for normal flash, and I would think/hope these drives are a bit better than that.

[wr975]

hard drive noise drives me insane. i went crazy a few months ago and bought all the 'quiet' kit i could afford. so, two samsung spinpoints (meant to be super quiet) and two raptor drives (quiet spinning but super loud clicking).

I read about it recently. There's a tool from Samsung to change the acoustic noise level of Spinpoint drives.

http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/utilities/hutil.htm

[JavaJones]

Note that AAM slows down hard drive performance noticeably however. It's the price you pay for quiet I guess.

- Oshyan