I've just upgraded to a SSD for my boot drive (and am SO enjoying the snappiness ), and I'm thinking it might be a good idea to upgrade my 4 year old secondary drive which I use for storing all my documents, photos, etc. Especially since I figure backing up the SSD would be a good idea, it's still a relatively "new" technology.

So I'm looking for something reasonably fast yet quiet. Not sure I want to go the green route as I'd still prefer something snappy even if it's mostly a data drive. I was thinking a 1TB Caviar Blue, until I read a forum post here about the new ones being rather noisy. 2.5" is an option, except I'm concerned about frequent head parking and larger capacities are a limitation. Any suggestions?

For pure storage i would go with a slower quieter drive, today 5400/5900 hdds are ideal for storage purposes. WD Green Caviar seem to be the most quiet, but personally i had issues with other WD drives and i avoid the brand if i have other options, personally i own multiple Hitachi 5k3000 and been wonderful, that would be my recommendation, specially since they are slightly faster as they are 5900rpm drives instead of 5400. The transfer rate is as good or better than 7200rpm drives release couple of years ago, they only lack in response time where 7200rpm drives are faster, but in my personal experience, for storage this doesnt matter much.

I would skip the second HDD and go with a gigabit NAS. That way all your devices can have access to the files. -and you can even get files off your nas remotely when away from home too... Its so handy to have my laptop, desktop, friends or work PC and PDA all have access to the same files no mater where i am.

Thanks for the suggestions. I've been thinking about a NAS for some time now, but I usually use just one PC, making it overkill for my needs.

Hitachi seem interesting. I read that they now have 1 TB per platter drives, in 1TB capacity (and below... huh?) which sounds like a good candidate for a low noise/power drive. But given the news is recent I don't know if they're available in the shops yet.

I actually stopped using those drives after being burnt by the DeathStar incident... But that *was* a long time ago. And under IBM at the time.

Do the lower speed Hitachis have the same head parking behaviour as the WD Greens? And how do the Caviar Blacks fare?

The main advantage of these is that they will get you the best bulk storage performance. To get a first approximation of the storage performance, you can multiply the density by the rotation speed. So it doesn't take a large jump in density to make a 5400rpm faster than an older 7200rpm (for large files only, not random access).

A 500G drive with 1T platters would mean only one side of the platter is used (so the drive would have only one head and would therefore in principle be more reliable).

The parking problem can easily be fixed on the WD's. For a secondary drive I went with a WD20EARX. It's very quiet.