Here's my experience: NEC 1990SXi Can't complain. There's a minimal amount of high-pitched whine coming from somewhere but I'm literally 1 ft in front of the monitor (part of why I'm still on a 19"). Standby makes a teeny bit of noise these days. Was a hardly-used demo unit that I bought in '12-ish,...

That foam stuff is brilliant. My main drive (a Hitachi T7K250) sits on two strips left and right which are about its length, some 4 cm wide and 3 cm high. Those in turn are placed on the burner conveniently residing underneath. There's a fan in front of the whole contraption that pulls air out (with...

www.tftcentral.co.uk Excellent info there - so now there are 6-bit *VA panels, too. A popular German TFT site would be prad.de . Interesting that noone has mentioned Eizo (e.g. S1910 or L778) or NEC models yet here - so I'll just do that. :p Back in the day I paid quite a bit more for my trusty Sam...

The unusually high power dissipation is most likely due to the SATA interface, for which 0.6 W more vs. PATA doesn't seem unrealistic. So a PATA version would not be unusually power hungry, certainly not a single platter version (specs or not). As for the warranty, you best check this upon receiving...

The Athlon64 can idle properly without special measures when being fed with HLT, like any other non-Athlon x86 CPU (leakage currents notwithstanding). You should make sure that C'n'Q is enabled though.

I have WD drive but I'm not sure if its a ball or fluid. It ried yahoo'ing it but nothing came up. The WD site says nothing. This is the drive number: WD800JBRTL This only says that it's a retail WD800JB, not more. You'd need the suffix (like -00XYA0) to determine its generation. Chances are, if it...

High-pitched whine? Can't confirm that on my T7K250, bought May, made April 05. The only thing whining is the ethernet switch on top of the comp (a towel around that catches most of the whine, it doesn't run warm anyway). Either the whiny one is a lemon or they're using the same motors as WD.

JFTR, the unusually high power draw is likely due to the SATA interface. SATA drives tend to draw around 0.6 W more than their PATA colleagues, judging by the iXBT numbers. One can only hope that notebooks to use SATA drives feature better drive cooling than the hard drive heaters of yore. Apparentl...

From the datasheet, those old Cudas need ~12 W in idle, ~.7 A on +12V and .8A on +5V. Your system needs quite a bit of juice on +5V (indeed, the VCore regulators work off this rail on your board) and then a moderate amount on +12V. IMHO you should be fine with a Fortron FSP300-60PN(PF) (or the 350 w...

Check out the specs on the various models, and you'll see that, to give an example, the SP0802N is spec'd with 4.8 W idle while the SP0812N is rated at 7.0 W, as the P80s have been from the start. Same goes for SP1203N/SP1213N and SP1604N/SP1614N. The marketing text is also different between the two...

sgrossklass wrote:...and it makes virtually no difference in noise whether the SV0802N is running.

BTW, I guess it would be "no difference at all" if the drive were decoupled, but it just sits in a 3.5" drive bay right under the floppy. Maybe I'll tackle that one day.

I'd try Samsung V80s. According to c't mag measurements their idle noise is a good bit lower than with the 7200 rpm units (0.4 vs. 0.6 sone for 2-platter units, only 0.2 sone for the single-platter SV0802N), and seeks aren't very loud (decoupling should eliminate them for the most part if there's an...

Just for kicks: Equipped with ye olde Adaptec SCSIBench, I have compared access noise levels of 1. the foam decoupled ST318406LW and 2. a 20 gig Travelstar 40GNX (salvaged from my poor fried notebook) on mounting rails, not decoupled but standing on a sheet of dampening mat in the fixed drive cage, ...

Well, with the 73 gigger I'm not too surprised it bothers you. It is overproportionally louder than the smaller models. (Measurements from c't mag indicate 2.0 sone idle, which is not quiet by any means. The datasheet specs 3.5 bels, vs. 3.2 bels for the 36 gig and 3.1 bels for the 18 gig models. Fo...

PS: Please excuse this longish post. BTW, the Micropolis certainly wasn't double height but normal height - this already referred to the height two (half height) CD-ROM drives stacked! (Plenty big enough nonetheless.) Yup, Micropolis drives were known for being very loud, hot and unreliable, no wond...

Should you ever come across a used Cheetah 36ES (68-pin) for cheap (they're not really expensive these days, I paid little more than 50 EUR for an 18 gigger more than half a year ago), this would certainly make an excellent replacement for the old WD Enterprise (which is really long in the tooth by ...

From what's given on the web, the Smart Drive looks like the better bet. You could still give it some airflow should this become necessary. (Incidentally, the 15K.3 has a spec'd power dissipation that's somewhat below that of a 36ES with the same capacity, quite a feat of engineering. It'll be coole...

I have a SV0802N in here, bought Jan 04 (made late '03, -24 firmware), with Nidec motor, which "sings" a bit when you stick your ear next to it, but is inaudible with the case closed. (Over the Cheetah 36ES anyway.) Our older SP1604N (bought Jul/Aug 03, -23 firmware, I didn't take notes on the compo...