I have recently had great difficulty with my harddrives and I am wondering if it is a heat problem, though it could also be the age of the drives...6 and 10 years with heavy use on two of them (the were second hand from a college but worked fine up to now, except for one bad sectore that I left unpartitioned). I suddenly had one harddrive detected by scandisk on every boot, then the other to now are consistently claimed to have corrputed files. I think I also Lost some data, but fortunately had most of it backed up.

I am wondering if i should just replace all three harddrives with two larger one (I must have two drives because of DAW use). I am wondering if switching to 2.5" inch drives will solve and heat issue as well as be quieter...but there is another issue because my computer has no SATA capability and I don't want to use adapters. I can afford to build a new system if neccesary, but I am also concerned if there is a significant drop in perfomance between a SATA Samsung 2.5" 5200rpm and my previous Seagate Barracudas 7200.7 Harddrives. Also, I am finding it hard to find SATA Samsung 2.5" drives...NewEgg won't ship to Canada. Thanks for your responses.

Hello,

I don't think it is heat -- they are just old and well used. Any new ones (3.5" or 2.5") are probably quieter, so so if you can live with the capacities available on 2.5", and you can get the IDE adapters, then that would be the quietest. Or, look on the SPCR recommended list for some good 3.5".

I should have mentioned that my current system is noiser than I would like and I don't really want to updrage it or fix it, with the possible exception of harddrives which can be easily put in another system, and I hesitate to buy IDE drives instead of SATA, hence the reason for needing a new motherboard. I only have a nearly 6 year old Athlon XP 1700+, so if using Windows XP as opposed to a 64 bit OS, would building a new system with the Athlon 64 processor make a huge perfomance difference (I'd need new Ram but it is cheap and I wanted to have more anyway for Virtual Instruments for home music studio use). I could afford around $800 to build a system but could only justify it if it was quiet enough that I won't want to silence it further in the future ie. a fanless or super quiet power supply instead of my enermax (which I mdded for 5 volt fans and can't believe it still works) so it would be either fanless or etremely quiet without modding. I would want a fanless Ninja or equivalent and if two case fans are necessary, they must be extremely quiet. The new case would need to be low vibration, though I could put it on the floor under my desk if that also helps. Thanks.

Hello,

You'll have to either use IDE drives in your current system, or build a completely new system, then. The perfomance differene between IDE and SATA is pretty minimal.

With $800 to spend I'd look long and hard at building a new system, maybe based on a Solo, or P182... if you are reasonably happy with the performance from the 1700+, noone is forcing you to get an "uber" cpu when you obviously dont have a need for it. A low-power amd dual core would probably last you a long time.

Ram is UBER cheap these days, its amazing. I remember paying 1700NOK (~300 USD) for 2x1GB Geil PC6400 about a year ago, and I just ordered a third stick of 1GB Crucial BallistiX PC8500 ram for 375NOK (~65USD)...

500GB samsung drives are cheap these days, what kind of data storage do you have now? brand/type/size?

Would the new Samung drives be quieter than my Seagate Baracuda 7200.7 drives...I was pretty satidfid with them before the died. I but a WD drive to replace a loud Maxtor (it is now in an external enclosure but could be put in the old or a new system, except that it is not as quiet as the old Baracudas...Would a drive silencer be worth the cost to match these newer drives to the noise level of the older ones?