I don't know what your background noise is but if you can hear a quiet, slow fan you can hear a 2T drive. So if money is tight, you might as well use a couple of fans to spend less on passive cooling parts.
In order to get zero noise, you'd need to set up the drive in another room at which point going as close to passive as your budget allows makes sense. And your budget seems to allow a fully passive system...
ist.martin wrote:
Total of this is $850 CDN, from NCIX locally. Is that as low priced as you can get when you want silence, an OS, a SSD and a media drive?
Of course not. You could probably get a fanless system with an SSD, a optical drive and an OS for about 30% of that price or maybe a bit more if gear is made more expensive by taxes in Canada. But I don't think that's what you're trying to do.
So here are a few ways to make your build cheaper without making it cheap (assuming you're not aiming at zero noise):
-drop your RAM to 4G which is overkill already
-replace the 2100 with a G620T (cheaper and lower power consumption) and the Samurai with a cheaper heatsink
-get a cheaper case, possibly with an integrated PSU
-replace that pico with a cheaper one (or use the PSU which comes with the case if you pick a different case)
-replace Windows with a free OS since you're not going to game
And here's a bit of advice which would make your build more expensive instead: if you're going to pay for Windows, get the full version and you'll be able to reuse it on other computers or resell it down the road. If you're not going to abide by Microsoft's licensing conditions, you might as well get Windows for free.
Windows 7 is going to last a long time and will retain its value much better than the hardware. It would be a long-term investment.
Something else: if you're going to spin down the hard drive, keep in mind that some systems return from standby about as fast as it takes a 3.5'' drive to spin up so you may be able to save electricity by having the box go into standby automatically. A perfectionist might set up standby on idle and use a program which prevents standby when clients are connected but it would be much easier to schedule standby at night and/or when people are typically out of the house. You can wake most systems from standby over the network.