There was a product which took "caddy'd" 2.5" disks in a RAID-1
mirrored system, LCD display. Didn't take off too well and they also
had trouble with the powered eject and so dropped that I recall.

As for RAID'd laptop drives for performance
o RAID-0 will give you performance with 2 drives
---- at the expensive of any RAID (hence the Zero)
---- so if a drive fails, you better have a recent backup
o RAID-10 will give you performance & mirroring with 4 drives
---- this has been done with 2.5" drives, review on the web

The problem is the fastest 2.5" disk whilst 7200rpm has slow seeks.
o For some desktop applications/data-sets notebook drives will be slow
o RAID-0 will help with the "maximum SDTR" by striping
o However striping doesn't help constant thrashing around with small files
---- rotational latency benefits from the 7200rpm drive
---- however access & seek times are laptop v desktop orientated

MS-IE breeds small files - from cookies to jpgs, gifs, history, etc etc.

So it comes down to your application-set & data-set:
o If you find them very slow on a laptop, ie, heavily I/O bound
o Then you are likely to find that a similar bottleneck on the desktop

RAID-0 will make a difference, but there *are* some very quiet 7200rpm
drives out there - Barracuda, Samsung and others are noted for low noise.
o If you can, increase the distance between your ears & the drive
---- siting the drive in the bottom rear of a case can be beneficial
---- moving the PC further away & using a USB linked optical drive
o Using soundproofing is treating the effect, not the cause, so less effective
---- noise leaks very effectively through any holes, which a PC is full of
o Despite this, some soundproofing approaches can be very effective
---- mounting the drive on acoustic isolators - bits of rubber or soft material
---- typically these are a rubber or, better, a visco-elastic material
---- these stop the case, the substrate, being excited into resonance

So I would not give up on the 3.5" desktop solution.
Also worth verifying what your noise source is - re seek or CPU fan or such.

For RAID, if the data is critical, the vendor matters:
o 3ware do some very reliable cards - but for RAID-0 benefits are lesser
---- so the money might be better spent on an offline daily backup hard-drive
o 3ware for RAID-10, ie, 4-port are a viable solution
---- that would give you RAID-0 striped performance, with mirroring
---- additionally the RAID array has automatic rebuild on drive failure

RAID-0 solutions lose all data if a single drive fails.
Laptop drives are also somewhat more expensive than desktop - 50-90% more.

You could always use Firewire 800 (more reliable it seems than USB) with a single
WD Raptor 10,000rpm to get your performance, then stick it a LONG way away.
Yes it will need decent cooling (use a larger enclosure), but also use a low noise fan.

Just some other solutions to think of - but prioritise around the key noise creators.
Modern quiet drives are notably quieter than even quite recent ball-bearing drives,
or even formerly "quiet" models - mounting & siting of the drive is also an issue too.

Think carefully, a RAID-0 2-notebook-drive solution is an expensive one.
Laptop drives are not silent during seeking - sound like faint ball-bearings bouncing.

I use a laptop to thin-client to several noisy PCs, to be quiet.
That is until the laptop drive starts playing pinball with itself or background I/O :-)
--
Dorothy Bradbury
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/dorothy...ry/panaflo.htm (Free Delivery)