"Silent" HD for PB

andersanders
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I am getting more and more tired of the HD in my Pismo because 1) its only 6 GB and 2) its loud. Can anyone recomment a more quiet HD at 30 or 40 GB. I have seen some Hitachi drives with "fluid" instead of ball bearings (is bearing the right word?). Will they do the trick?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    scadboyscadboy Posts: 189member
    I replaced the 6GB drive in my Pismo with a 30GB IBM Travelstar, purchased from OtherWorld Computing.



    <a href="http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Item.cfm?ID=4317&Item=IBM07N8326"; target="_blank">http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Item.cfm?ID=4317&Item=IBM07N8326</a>;



    While not "silent" it is much quieter than the old 6GB drive, it also helped boost my OS X performance. I had 1GB of RAM installed while I still had the old 6GB drive, and suddenly my machine crawled to a halt. Once I installed the 30GB drive, everything sped up very dramatically. I attribute this to having insufficient space for creating an adequate swap file under the 6GB drive.



    Btw, I'd recommend picking up their "On the Go" external firewire enclosure. You can drop your old 6GB drive into it and use it for handy high-capacity storage. And it looks pretty cool, too.



    <a href="http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Item.cfm?ID=3420&Item=OWCMOTGFW"; target="_blank">http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Item.cfm?ID=3420&Item=OWCMOTGFW</a>;



    hope this helps,



    ciao,



    michael
  • Reply 2 of 5
    neutrino23neutrino23 Posts: 1,562member
    There is a ton of information about this at xlr8yourmac.com. It seems that fluid or liquid bearings are the way to go. I put a larger HD in my Pismo in Januaray. After a few months it developed a loud whine. Presumably drives with liquid bearing won't do this.



    I'm thinking of dropping in a new drive. I looked at the web sites of some drive makers and found that you can see the model numbers of those drives that have liquid bearings. In other words, it is possible to find these drives.
  • Reply 3 of 5
    jregojrego Posts: 56member
    One thing to keep in mind is that your hard drive may not be the only thing making noise in your computer. I've seen laptop fans that range from fairly loud to sounding like the poor laptop was dying a slow and terrible death. If you have one that tends toward the noisy side, I believe that with a bit of tinkering, you should be able to retrofit a quieter fan for $10 or less. I've never tried this myself, but it seems like the kind of thing that should work. After all, quiet hard drive motors could also be used to make quiet fans, and I'm sure somebody has had the same gripe about the sound level.
  • Reply 4 of 5
    neutrino23neutrino23 Posts: 1,562member
    The fans on the G3 PBs rarely turned on. The noise is almost certainly from the HD.
  • Reply 5 of 5
    senior burnsenior burn Posts: 35member
    My Prismo hard drive sounded like a 474 taking off, so I replaced it with a 30 gig IBM Travelstar from Newegg.com. I found that they had the best price (according to pricewatch) at $109. It didn't come with a manual or anything, but it came in a packed box in a static-proof envolope. Now, I can only hear it when it accesses when it boots up, then it goes scilent.
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