Does such a external harddrive exist?

In article .com,
"DaLoverhino" wrote:

Hello. I can be quite particular about the noise my PC makes. I got
an external harddrive that's in an aluminum casing. The casing is
fanless. I hate the noise the actual harddrive makes. I want to
replace it. I'll replace the casing and/or the harddrive, I don't
care. I just want the noise to stop. It's a high pitch whirring
noise, of the platters spinning. It's also an IBM drive that seems to
generate a buttload of heat, which also worries me.

I've done some surfing on amazon, and found that most external
harddrives advertised as near noiseless are aluminum, and fanless.
This is basically the description of my external casing right now. I
bought my external harddrive roughly 4 years ago. I'm wondering if
buying these new harddrives will actually make a difference? Or, is
what they consider 'near noiseless' basically what drives me mad?


Also, do they design harddrives to be external? Or do they just put a
'normal' harddrive in an external casing? When I got my external
drive, I was rather dismayed. I bought a cheap external drive from a
Yahoo company. It was basically an IBM drive, with an external casing.
I had to assemble the whole thing myself. Needless to say, I've been
driving myself insane ever since. Yes, I'm a glutton for punishment at
times.

thanks.

Consider the characteristics of the enclosure for a moment. If it is
aluminum, it is light as a feather. Any vibration in the drive can make
the aluminum case shake as well. And the aluminum can function as an
acoustic amplifier if it resonates, making the sound worse instead
of better.

There are some external cases that have rubber feet, and a soft plastic
shell. If the assembly is heavy enough, you'd get some damping of
the vibration. But, for the direct acoustic output from the drive
itself, you might not get any relief by using a new enclosure.
(There should be some air holes for cooling.)

With respect to drive construction itself, you can find disk drive
mechanisms where the rotating platters are close to silent, but when
the disk does a seek, it is constrained to do that quickly. You will
still hear seek noise, and if you use the "find" command on your
computer, there will be an unmistakable chattering sound from the
drive. So, you should have some reasonable expectations about what
parts of the noise you can improve and what parts will continue to
be higher than the ambient noise level.

I have several old IBM 9GB SCSI drives, and the bearing noise has
increased with age. If I had to use a drive like that regularly,
I would replace it (and that is why the lot of them have been
retired - I only dig them out for "clean-install" experiments).
If your drive was like my old SCSI drives, I'd stop using it :-)

You can look here, at the Storagereview database, to find a quiet
drive to put in a new enclosure. Select "Idle Noise" from the menu.
The Seagate 7200.9 has a good rating.

http://www.storagereview.com/comparison.html

So perhaps a new enclosure and a new disk will make a better
solution. Shopping for the enclosure will be the hard part,
and it is difficult to pick a winner based on the typical info
you get on the web sites.

Paul