Wow, that's quite a find that these drives do have head parking enabled? I must say I doubt it.

I am considering buying the Red's for my ZFS raid system, but really need to know if this headparking is audible or not. I dont' need extra noise every 8 seconds.

@cash: Thanks for the extensive reply! It is enlightening. Here in the Netherlands, the price for the AMD BE-2400 and the E4400 are the same (within a margin of 5 Euro), so the price thing is not a factor. Since performance is better on a E4400 I would go for that one because I also use my server fo...

FYI: I ran ntune on a fresh Windows XP Pro for my p7k500 250GB (Hitachi HDP725025GLA380), attached to a silicon 3114 SATA PCI card on a p4 2.4 Ghz.

Speeds are good, but access time is horrible!

I am building a server too, and am wondering, why don't you people go for a Intel E4400 ? According to the specs it has a 8W idle usage. Especially since someone here recommends a Txxx processor, which is lots of money, while the E4400 is around 60 Euro here. Could somebody enlighten me why to go fo...