I'm having a tough time finding advice, recomendations, reviews and forum posts on quiet optical drives. Searching on this site often gives in excess of 10000 hits of which none in the first 5-10 pages are about optical drives.

I'm looking for a quiet DVD RW drive for a gaming/htpc hybrid rig. Originally I thought I'd just get the Samsung Writemaster from quietpc.co.uk but I then realised theres little information about its quietness and it can't yet be flashed to region free/rpc1 (Region encoding is simply an outrageous price fixing excercise thats against international trading agreements, even illegal in Austalia afaik). My current NEC model from my previous rig is screaming at full spin (maybe 8x?). I know that many drives now can be slowed down: great for playing DVDs and CDs at 1x but still no idea if they're quiet in relative or absolute terms.

Suggestions and pointers greatly welcome.

Hello & welcome to SPCR!

I've had good luck with Sony DVD writers:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16827131038

In my experience the cheapest drives do make the most noise.
I have a pioneer dvdrom dvd-119 which has good vibration damping so the sound is quite smooth, compared to some cheap noisy drives. But it is an old drive.
But I haven't heard a really quiet dvd drive ever I think.

I'm not sure how true that is about quiet drives. I have 3 Plextor drives (DVD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD-RW) and they all make a ton of noise when they're spinning. Mine are a bit old though, so I'm sure that has something to do with it.

Some Plextor drives have a variable speed setting using their config tool, so you can quiet them down considerably if you're willing to sacrifice some speed. That might be your best bet.

Yeah, pretty much anything can be slowed down with Nero DriveSpeed, though I think some don't work. And in Linux you can just use hdparm, and there are some alternatives when that doesn't work.

Everything is going to make a ton of noise at full speed, it's the nature of the beast. And you're going to want to install at full speed, or it just takes forever. The trick is finding something with a good noise characteristic so you get the most out of slowing it to 2-4x when you're playing a movie or music and it counts. For that I've had good luck with Plextor and Pioneer, and I've heard good things about LG surprisingly.

I bought a plextor 504a dvd/cd r/w drive a number of years back.
I never hear it when its running. Decidedly NOT cheap though.

mabye look at plextor's site and see what the current gen of that one is.

Not LiteOn. Ever. I got mine for CD ripping, but leave it turned off most of the time . All of theirs are generally very loud, even when forced to spin slowly, and should be avoided at all costs if you want one that's quiet.

i'm using the asus sata optical drives...i think the model number is 1814 or something. the tray is a bit flimsy, but if you're careful it should be ok.