Which Drives for quiet Raid 0?

[smckean]

I am building a pair of gaming rigs for the wife and I with the following rough specs

Intel e8400
780i board
8 gigs of ram
2x8800 GTS 512
Creative X-fi Gamers
Antec P180
Vista x64

I want SATA Raid 0 for the OS but size is not a big concern. We back most important stuff up on an NAS drive. We primarily game so we dont need a huge amount of space. In fact, we havent filled the 250s on our old rigs. The obvious answer to this question is Raptors. But as i understand it they are loud. So i am posting in search of some recommendations about what drives are as close to that performance level as possible but quiet.

Another possability is to get one of the sound dampening cases like the cooler masters or the antec p190 but i am not sold on a case upgrade unless its something special.

Any constructive input would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Shawn

 

[rwpritchett]

Head on over to www.silentpcreview.com and check out their recommended hard drives. Generally speaking, Samsung drives are higly recommended based on their accoustics, but they don't perform as well as Seagates and WD's. Perhaps you could go for a single Seagate 7200.11 setup? They are very quiet, yet they perform at near-raptor speed.

 

[rwpritchett]

Oh, another good site to check out for purchasing quiet pc components is www.quietpcusa.com.

 

[skittle]

the seagates are NOT quiet. The quietest solutions: Flash drives.
The next best thing are 2.5" laptop drives.

 

[I]

RAID0 is for performance. Hard drive seeking is the loudest noise. Faster seeks are louder.

Something has to give, quiet goes against performance but the answer to quiet versus performance might be found on the following chart, where you can pick what tradeoff to make. Basically I just used their search feature and compared everything at 40db or less noise.

http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/suite_v4.php?typeID=10&testbedID=4&osID=6&raidconfigID=1&numDrives=1&devID_0=351&devID_1=352&devID_2=340&devID_3=350&devID_4=325&devID_5=324&devID_6=298&devID_7=299&devID_8=349&devID_9=313&devID_10=337&devID_11=336&devID_12=314&devID_13=315&devID_14=316&devID_15=263&devID_16=274&devID_17=334&devID_18=347&devID_19=329&devID_20=343&devCnt=21