I found it difficult to have to browse through hundreds of forum posts just to find out whether a drive is quiet or not by feedback. Mostly because a lot of people post model numbers and drives in their signature, bringing a lot of false positives.

Now it wouldn't be right to just tell people what they can or can do based on this.

But wouldn't it be nice if we could lookup a model, and see exactly how quiet people think that product is?

I'm thinking there should be a database for that, so people could submit a noise rating out of 10 and a comment. Which would then let people search for the 'highest rated quiet products' or see an 'average user quietness rating.' Assuming everyone reported back, it would show us which drives have a lot of duds from the factory, and which are flawless.

The idea isn't flawless, as a 6 to someone can be a 10 to another, but it'd definately make searching to see what people think of a drive/case fan/psu fan/vga fan a lot easier? And overall, if 95% of the people think something is quiet, it probably is quiet.

I've noticed storagereview has a reliability survey/database, which basically lets users select their model and state how long their drive has been active, and whether it has failed or not. It makes it very easy to tell which drives are particularly bad.

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Anyway, that's the idea, and since I'm the one who's suggested it, I'm also willing to design it in PHP/MySQL if necessary.

I like this idea. The reviews at Newegg are a good place to see if people have had good or bad experiences with a product. Something along this line but more silence-orientated would be great. If you felt risky and bought a new product that said it was quiet and found otherwise, you could post it so the next person who is looking at that product can get an idea before hand.

This could help fill the gap as SPCR has a limited amount of time/money to review the thousands of products out there. Plus, they mentioned they won't post a review just to bash a product. Perhaps in these cases, they could just post a comment that it wasn't worth writing a review for it.