Advice re second hard drive

I would like to add a second hard drive to my Dimension 8400 as a backup
for my home movies, but am wondering about the noise implications of
this in my small ‘office’. It might be better to have an external USB
disk, but these take up room and seem relatively expensive.

Grateful for any advice, ie:
- would an internal disk be spinning all the time the PC is switched on,
even when I am just using Excel/Word?
- recommendations re a quiet, reliable, internal disk – say 200Gb.

Many thanks

Rod

Any hard disk - internal or external - is spinning at all times, and
anything that spins at 7200 rpm (at least) makes some amount of noise.

Hard disks are hardly the only source of sound coming from a computer. The
cooling fans are noisy. Optical drives can make an annoying grinding sound.
Either of these are likely to be louder than almost any hard disk you add to
your computer. And any mechanical device can get noisier over its life, so a
disk that sounds great in the beginning may not sound so great as time goes
by.

It's more important to pick a hard disk for its performance and reliability.
The only advantage of an external hard disk is portability.

Among consumer brands today, the lead in performance and reliability is
constantly changing hands. The last time I looked - a little over a year
ago - Seagate and Hitachi (which bought IBM's hard disk operation) were
rated highly, and Seagate was thought of as particularly quiet. But what
happens if a Seagate disk just happens to hit a particular harmonic in your
computer (or its external enclosure)?

Ted Zieglar

"Rod Bean" wrote in message
...
I would like to add a second hard drive to my Dimension 8400 as a backup
for my home movies, but am wondering about the noise implications of this
in my small ‘office’. It might be better to have an external USB disk, but
these take up room and seem relatively expensive.

Grateful for any advice, ie:
- would an internal disk be spinning all the time the PC is switched on,
even when I am just using Excel/Word?
- recommendations re a quiet, reliable, internal disk – say 200Gb.

Many thanks

Rod

Samsung's Spinpoint series of hard drives are considered to be *the*
quietest hard drives on the market.

If I was to buy a hard drive, I'd go for Seagate or Samsung Spinpoint.
As Ted said, unless you have a totally silent computer (silent case
fans, processor heatasink fan, etc) you won't hear the extra hard drive
that you put in your computer.

External Hard drives are only the cost of the hard drive plus the cost
of the external enclosure, usually about 30$ I think. This will mean
you have to install the hard drive in the enclosure yourself, but it
also means that you can upgrade it in the future in the case of needing
a bigger hard drive / the current one dies.

Look around the internet to see which are the better enclosures, which
ones overheat and cause hard drives to die prematurely, etc.

Good luck.

Ahhh! I have a 2nd hdd that I brought over into my new Dim 8400 from my old
XPS 700. It's my backup drive and I'm tellin' ya it's loud. I didn't
realize just how loud until I got the new computer. When the backup (WD)
isn't "on", my 8400 is very quiet. I have the backup drive set to spin down
after 15 minutes of non use. So when it's accessed, I definitely know about
it. I'd hoped there was a way of disabling it other than unplugging the
drive but apparently there isn't. I'm going to check out the drives below.
Is the Spinout reliable?
Monica
"maian" wrote in message
oups.com...
Samsung's Spinpoint series of hard drives are considered to be *the*
quietest hard drives on the market.

If I was to buy a hard drive, I'd go for Seagate or Samsung Spinpoint.
As Ted said, unless you have a totally silent computer (silent case

I have three hard drives in my XPS Gen 3. Can't hear any of them! Of
course it sits on the carpeted floor under my desk.

"Rod Bean" wrote in message
...
I would like to add a second hard drive to my Dimension 8400 as a backup
for my home movies, but am wondering about the noise implications of this
in my small ‘office’. It might be better to have an external USB disk, but
these take up room and seem relatively expensive.

Grateful for any advice, ie:
- would an internal disk be spinning all the time the PC is switched on,
even when I am just using Excel/Word?
- recommendations re a quiet, reliable, internal disk – say 200Gb.

Many thanks

Rod

"Rod Bean" wrote in message
...
I would like to add a second hard drive to my Dimension 8400 as a backup
for my home movies, but am wondering about the noise implications of this
in my small ‘office’. It might be better to have an external USB disk, but
these take up room and seem relatively expensive.

Grateful for any advice, ie:
- would an internal disk be spinning all the time the PC is switched on,
even when I am just using Excel/Word?
- recommendations re a quiet, reliable, internal disk – say 200Gb.

Many thanks

Rod


I'm running dual disks in my Dimension 8300 and for me anyway, it is simply
not noticeable.


Stew

Many thanks for all the advice!

Rod Bean wrote:

I would like to add a second hard drive to my Dimension 8400 as a backup
for my home movies, but am wondering about the noise implications of
this in my small ‘office’. It might be better to have an external USB
disk, but these take up room and seem relatively expensive.

I have 4 HDDs in my 8400 - 2 SATAs & 2 PATAs. Runs whisper quiet. I
would expect an external HDD to be nosier, although you can power them
off when not in use.

Grateful for any advice, ie:
- would an internal disk be spinning all the time the PC is switched on,
even when I am just using Excel/Word?

Internal drives spin all the time (probably quieter that way than
constantly stopping/starting them).

- recommendations re a quiet, reliable, internal disk – say 200Gb.

I replaced the 80GB Western Digital HDD that came with the 8400 with a
250GB Hitachi SATA and added a Maxtor 300GB SATA drive (which is my C:
drive because it has NCQ & a 16MB cache).