Hi, sorry for posting another "could somebody please recommend" thread but I'm struggling to find reviews for some of the smaller capacity drives about at the moment, particularly that place any emphasis on noise.

I need something reasonably cheap (which obviously rules out SSD) as its looking like my PC build is going to go a bit over-budget! As mentioned in the subject title 250-320GB is my storage requirement.

I'd look for the WD blue 2.5" drives of that capacity. I've used the 250 & 500gb drives extensively and they are very quiet. IIRC, they also had (have?) a 320gb drive in that series.

Well, the WD Scorpio Blue 500 GB WD5000LPVT, reviewed within a year, could fit your needs. Though 500 GB, it's quite cheap and ultra quiet. It received the Editor's Choice Award here at SPCR.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1268-page7.html

Thank you for the replies, very much appreciated. I have been doing some more research and having another fairly good think about things.

Firstly, the recommendations above are excellent ones based on my original question and I'm sure that for the right machine, the WD Scorpio Blue 500 GB is a very good drive. However I noticed that it didn't perform fantastically in the benchmarks when compared to some of the other HDDs (with some seemingly quite significant time differences). I'm just a little concerned that by opting to buy cheap on one component I could be creating a bottleneck that messes up the bigger picture. I noticed that the internal transfer rate of most drives in the same category is around 125MB/s. What are people's feelings on whether this will be fast enough, considering that I will be using an i5-3570k (3.4+GHz quad-core) CPU with integrated graphics (no gaming). I will be using the PC largely for general purposes although occasionally I do some compiling and other more resource intensive tasks.

If not then I would be prepared to spend a bit more as one of the things I've realized since my last post was that my original price estimation was not quite accurate given the type of system I'm looking for.

I wouldn't pay much attention to these benchmarks.
125MB/s is pretty good for most purposes. Trouble is, you won't be getting anywhere as much in practice. The main bottlenecks of hard drives aren't peak throughput but random access and concurrent access.

If you don't have enough money for a 250G SSD but want decent performance, I recommend the combination of a cheap SSD + a cheap HD.
If you spend a bit of time cleaning up default installs and removing useless stuff, you can end up with a lot of usable space on a cheap SSD, especially if you buy used. Use the HD for large files (especially AV files), backups and archives.
The speed of your CPU is irrelevant. In general usage, a hard drive would be a bottleneck often enough if you were using the slowest desktop Atom.

If you insist on not using SSDs and don't mind your storage being a little less reliable, you could choose between buying a larger drive and short-stroking it (easy) or using several cheap hard drives (more involved). Make sure you've got enough RAM (and the needed software settings) to cache aggressively and you'll get halfway decent performance either way.

Sorry for the delay in reply on this, thanks very much for the recommendations, I think I will buy a cheap, quiet 2.5" HDD like the WD Scorpio Blue. If I feel like I need more speed then I'll probably add in a decent quality ~50GB capacity SSD at a later stage and transfer the operating system, etc onto that.

Seagate Momentus Thin ST320LT007 is pretty much inaudible. Even if I hold the drive to my ear it's difficult to hear it running. Specs say 20dB. It's a single platter, 7200rpm unit so it's pretty quick for what it is, and uses very little power - about 1W.

Better in every way to the Scorpio Blue IMHO.

An SSD does wonders to the whole "computer experience" which might not be obvious to the novice. Why not go with one of the affordable 128GB SSDs that's out there? I mean, if you can afford an i5-3570k..
I would rather go i3+ssd than i5+hdd for a general mostly office stuff computer.