Hey im building a moderately quiet pc, and one thing ive noticed is that both my lite-on cd-rom and my samsung cd-rom, i think they are both 52x, are really loud. Not when they are idle, but whenever they have a cd in them them are the loudest thing in the computer by far. Ive read that the asus 52x cd-roms are quiet but i want one that is black and that would mean i would have to paint the bezel cause they dont make black ones. any advice on painting bezels or quiet cd-roms? i heard that kenmores were quiet too but they stopped making those.

kenmore? the only brand I've heard of sounding like that name is kenwood, u could also slow down your cd rom on your computer and save yourself some money http://www.cd-silence.com/ <- u need to register this version the software slows down your CD ROM reading speeds http://cdromtool.hopto.org/ this one is free and let's u twiddle the speeds to your hearts content have fun

Painting the bezels is fairly easy, just carefully pry them off the front of the drive, prime and spray-paint them. They're usually attached with clips. Do not attempt to paint them with the drive assembled. No matter how good a job you think you did masking it off, a single speck of paint on a laser lens will ruin the whole thing. If your buying new drives some online stores will paint them for you. I had Directron paint my drives silver for me. Much cheaper than buying silver fronted ones.

But how often do you actually use you CD drive? Mine are loud as hell, but almost never used. Any games I play are on the HDD, and any Audio CD's I listen to alot I've ripped to mp3 long ago. So besides the 5 seconds of spin-up at boot they're completely silent. (And I don't think I've rebooted my machine in weeks)

The Lite-on LTD-163 is pretty much completely silent during DVD operation (it's a DVD drive) - I can't hear it over my hard drive and PS, anyways (which are both relatively quiet). By default, the drive runs at 1x when playing back DVD movies (how they did that, I don't know).

During regular use, however, it's pretty noisy when it spins up. Not terribly noisy (no more or less than any other CD-ROM drive I've used) but certainly not what I would call "quiet." To top it off, it's a pretty damn fast DVD drive. Good transfer rates.

damn kenwood, i couldnt remember that for the life of me, i think im going to paint an asus drive, and then use software to quiet it if its still too much.

what happened to kenwood? if they made the fastest and quietest cdroms why did they go out of buisness?

I heard something about their cd-rom drives having some sort of weird things happen to them, like some cd's wouldn't play no matter what etc.

But they were supposed to be damn quiet though...

Kenwood didn't go out of business, they just stopped making computer peripherals. They still make other electronics, mostly car audio components. Their CD-ROM drives claim to fame was their use of multiple lasers. The used 7 lasers to read the disk. That was they could get really fast read speeds, 72X, while still having the disk spin at a low speed. Thats what made them so quiet. You can still find used ones on Ebay.

well damn some cdrom company needs to pick up that technology and fix it so i can have a 148x black cdrom that is dead silent in the near future.

Lol. Do you really need a CD-rom drive that fast? If I needed the data that fast I'd just transfer the data once to my harddrive. Considering how low the $/GB ratio has gone these days ($75 for an 80Gig HDD) there really is no reason not to.

Dear GamingGod,

I wish to offer you some words of wisdom: be wary of the type of paint you buy!

Some acrylic spray-on paints will melt the plastic parts of your drives, and enamel may work better. Covering white plastic with black can be difficult. You might find the black paint may wear off with use. Also, there is flat black & glossy (shiny) finishes. You might want to get an old drive and test spray it.

For most drive tray covers, the plastic cover only comes off when the slide door is open. You carfeully apply pressure to the cover and it lifts upwards. Once this cover is off, the bezel can be removed. Again, the bezel is usuall held in with clips or small screws.

As for quite drives: I have seen enclosures with vertical sliding panels that hide the drives and offer some level of quietness. I had an older DataTrain case that had a door that hid the drives (mostly a dust cover) and while the drives were running, I hardly heard them.

Good luck.

TerryW

im just kidding about 148x drives although i dont see why someone doesnt try using kenwood technology and making it into a new fast and quiet drive. I was only worried about it cause some games need the cd in to play and if its making all that noise then its gonna bother me, infact the drive speed isnt all that important cause you really only install a game once, i could live with a quiet 24x drive even.

Try looking for "no cd" cracks for the games you play. I've found one for every game I play. Not only is it quieter, but it also saves me the trouble of switching CD's whenever I switch games.

well thanks for the help everyone, ill probably either get an asus cdrom and paint it black or dye it black, or ill get a dvd player, problem is i dont have any dvd's

I had a Kenwood 72X "TrueX" CD drive. Here's a brief rundown of the advantages / disadvantages of it:

Pros:
* FAST AS HELL!!! You don't need it for games, but it rocks when you are installing tons of software. (I still use it just for this purpose.) This thing's dangerous, though; it makes reinstalling your system almost fun.
* Very quiet. About as noisy as a quiet 4x or 8x CD drive, which is not that noisy.
* Consistent high throughput. Less of a speed difference between the inner and outer track than standard drives. This is why they gave them the "TrueX" monkier.

Cons:
* Very high return rate. I don't know the numbers, but the whole product line, from the 52X to the 72X was plagued with returns of units that failed to read CDs after the first few months of use.
* Very finicky about media. When it does to decide to read CD-Rs or RWs at all, it reads at much slower speeds.
* Sucks at DAE. For regular DAE, it's fast, but the quality is somtimes sketchy. When I tried to use Exact Audio Copy, I would continually get errors, with an overall throughput of about 0.1x .

So, unless you're running a server that mirrors install packages for network installs of commercial programs or something, don't bother trying to get one.

Here's a comparitive review of this unit at Storage Review.

P.S. Some optical drives have speed-limiting utlities with them that let your stipulate a maximum rotation speed. I think that Asus drives are supposed to have this; I don't know what others do.

I reallly can recommend the Sony DDU-1621 DVD-ROM drive. It's really very quiet even when reading from cd/dvd-discs.

Easily the quietest drive I've ever heard.

Reading around I get the feeling that the new Sony DRU-500A DVD RW combo could also be a relatively quiet unit. Anyone had any experience with this...?

Thanks

I bought a Liteon 32x CDRW (forgot the model #, but there's only one I think). At the time (this last summer) it was end of the line, but I bought it at the same price as a 40x because it's much quieter. I recommend it. You might find one around if you look.
Also remember to look for CD rpm / spinup / spindown control software. The one I found CDRomTool seems good, and the site has a compatability list, a must-remember if you want to keep a drive quiet. It might even solve the troubles with your present drive

Good luck.