At 02:37 PM 6/17/2003 -0700, Brian de Alwis wrote:
>I wanted to quickly follow-up on this: does anybody have any
>recommendations for very quiet notebook drives?  My drive (an IBM
>DJSA-210) has started generating a noticeable bit of noise.  Since
>I was thinking about getting something with greater capacity...

The newer IBM laptop drives seem to be much quieter than the older ones. 
I've got a couple of the 40GN series 4200rpm 40GB IBM laptop drives 
(IC25N040ATCS04) and they make less noise than the fan in my Thinkpad 600X 
(ie it's just about the same amount of noise as the Seagate Barracuda IV 
desktop drive Wolfgang mentioned). They've got a 5400RPM model now that 
sells for just slightly more (and everything is ~ 30% less than when I got 
mine a year ago), but I don't know what it sounds like. (Note that IBM 
drives became Hitachi recently, and there are now many more models to 
choose from, which may have drastically different audio characteristics).

Last time I went looking for drives, it seemed like just about all the 
drive manufacturers had noise specs listed in information on their websites.