I know DVDRW is kinda old news... but I am building a HTPC and wanna put a decent DVDRW in there that's pretty quiet, until I upgade later to bluray.

Any idea what's a good quiet DVDRW?

Thanks

I've had good experiences with the LG GH22NS50 DVDRW. I'm actually planning on putting one in my upcoming build. The drive itself performs quietly at most speeds, and quieter than others at the highest speeds. At ~$18 CDN it's a great deal. I don't have any first hand experience with the 24x version, but I'd imagine it would perform more or less the same.

Thanks. I remember in the past there were some drives that when performed at x1 the were very quiet by turning fan off. Is the LG like that?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by that, there is no fan in this DVDRW drive, or any other that I know of for that matter. When watching a DVD the drive operates extremely quietly. I haven't tried specifically tuning the speed with something like DriveSpeed as I rarely use the optical drive anyways.

The "fan" alexb is referring to isn't actually a fan, but the noise the drive makes during high-speed rotation of the disc (gradually getting louder once you exceed around 8-12x or so). With non-ball-bearing mechanism drives, the drive is extremely quiet up to a certain point (then the drive starts to actually vibrate, which has serious risks and repercussions -- including the disc actually shattering (yes really!)). While with ball-bearing mechanism drives, they tend to be extremely loud at all times, but tend to have better ABS when it comes to dealing with drive vibration.

Me personally, I can't stand ball-bearing drives. I call them "snake drives" because they sound like they're hissing during spin-up and spin-down. Sony introduced this crap back in the mid-90s (I had an IDE Sony 20x drive which ripped CDs fast as hell but sounded like a snake), then it went away for a while, but came back once Sony started selling their Optiarc crap. No wonder you can get drives for US$30 now -- they're all ball-bearing. Sad.

For what it's worth, I can easily hear optical drives (specifically the noise of the disc being rotated, not the reads/writes or seeks (those are always audible)) when playing a DVD movie directly from the disc -- both bearing-based and non-bearing-based drives. The bearing ones are by far worse -- you almost wish the drive was running at higher speeds just to mask the noise (resembles a high-frequency whine).

For this reason I tend to rip DVDs to my hard disk using DVD Decrypter, then watch the film by mounting it via Alcohol 120%, followed by deleting the ISO when finished (yes really, I do this; I'm an honest/moral Netflix customer). I just put up with the noise when ripping CDs. But it'll be a cold day in hell before I ever own a ball-bearing drive again.