External Drive: HDD or SSD

SSD would be a waste

Plus, USB 2.0 has an effective max throughput of 35 MB/s. Won't even saturate a third of a slow hard drive's bandwidth.

You can buy 256 GB SSDs for $110 or so, and that is twice as large as your current iTunes music library. It won't be any faster than an HD due the USB2 interface, but it would be silent, and since you currently have an SSD, that's something to consider. As for HDs, I can't think of a single reason for you to go with a 7200 RPM drive over, say, a WD green drive, which is 5400 RPM.

quote:

---

So I won't be able to tell the difference between 5400 and 7200?

---

Not at all, except the 5400 would be ever-so-slightly quieter.

Great. Thanks for all the info guys.

quote:

---

So I won't be able to tell the difference between 5400 and 7200?

---

Nope. I see very little point in drives > 5400 RPM for general home use and no point for home media use, and attached to USB2, there will be no difference transferring to and from the drive. Over SATA or USB3, current 5400 RPM drives can read/write at well over 100 MB/sec sustained, which is plenty fast for ordinary purposes. They're quieter than 7200 RPM drives, and to me that's a lot more important than a little extra speed that won't benefit me as I use SSDs for the things that do benefit.

That's important. In general, the greater the density, the greater the speed. The fewer the platters, the less the noise and energy use/heat.

That said, I don't want more than one HD in a computer sitting anywhere near me in a quiet room, and capacity is thus the overriding factor for me. More than one HD can introduce a sometimes faintly audible resonance at idle even when mounted with silicone grommets in my P182. OTOH, a single 4 TB WD Green drive is inaudible at idle. Even seeks are inaudible, which is somewhat surprising considering the noise they make in an exposed dock.

The other noise factor is automatic head parking AKA load/unload cycles. I made the mistake of putting a Seagate 4 TB drive in my file server/gaming machine, and the periodic parking cannot be adjusted. At least WD has the WDIDLE3 software to control this for their drives. I find the Seagate is also substantially louder at both idle and seeking than the WD green drives. I think it's 5900 RPM vs 5400, and I bought it because I got a really good deal on it. I would pay more for a WD.

This all reminds me of spinning up some 25 y/o drives a few months back. They were every bit as screechingly loud as I recalled. I guess I was a lot more tolerant back in the day.

quote:

---

That's the one benefit of my computer sitting on a carpeted floor. No hard drive noise, all resonance totally muffled.

---

Well, my P182 is on a solid wood Rubbermaid shelf on a carpeted floor (nice fit, slides around easily, helps it breathe), and the case itself has soft silicone feet similar to the silicone grommets used to mount the drives. The resonance was a very subtle, faint sound, and it was something that came and went. The Antec P182 is a real beast of a case OOTB, and I also installed Acoustipack in it. I don't think the floor had anything to do with it, just two drives spinning at the same speed with very minimal coupling through the robust case. A single drive in a typical case would have been 100x worse than two in the P182, and reducing the count to one eliminated the HD as a noise source in the P182.

FWIW, my CPU fan is 200 RPM, my GPU is fanless, my two case fans are 500 RPM, and my PSU fan probably never comes on (Seasonic X650). It doesn't take much to penetrate its negligible noise floor. Getting there of course was a series of fix the loudest component, then the new loudest one, etc, but it's doable.

quote:

---

all close together sitting on a wooden desk. That arrangement did not last long.

---

Desks and chests of drawers can be the worst. They're not perfectly rigid, and I think the hollow drawers must act like little echo chambers

quote:

---

What's your primary use of this PC? I've toyed with the idea of doing a near-fanless build for recording.

---

It's my main PC and HTPC. The CPU is an i5 4670, so it's not some horrible low-powered system. Even at full load, it's still extremely quiet, with the fans staying below 700 RPM.

I have a separate gaming machine/file server that's only on when there's some audio playing, so it doesn't need to be so quiet. That said, I put an Asus GTX660 in it, and I am very impressed with its dual fan solution, AFTER fixing the ticking problem in the fan closest to the backplate. Two samples had the exact same problem, and the reason was the plastic shroud. I was able to fix it by inserting a little piece of paper to add some tension between it and the card. It's better than the GTX460 with its supposedly quiet fan, which really was reasonably quiet only after modding the BIOS to drop it from 30% to 10% minimum speed.

It just boils down to how much storage you want today, and how much you're willing to pay for it.