My new 250Gb Maxtor drives are essentially inaudible, even without setting them into quiet mode

Interesting.
I recently upgraded my Tivo with a Maxtor drive.
It was so damn noisy that it sounded like a coffee grinder was continuously at work in my living room!

I pulled it and replaced it with a Western Digital.
Now I have blissful silence (well, nearly).

I guess I should have tried the Maxtor software tweaks first, because
the WD drive was actually 4GB smaller than the Maxtor (though
both were labelled as identical capacity).
This meant that I couldn't use the wacky Tivo backup software to
copy everything onto it; it only handles copying to equal or larger size
drives (in order to avoid messing with the non-standard Tivo filesystem
too much).

So I have a week's worth of unwatched programs sitting on a spare unused drive
on my desk.

But it was worth it to get that extremely noisy Maxtor out of my living room!

Plus now I have two backup drives if a power spike takes one out.
(You'd think it'd be the other components; but when workmen started
yanking my power on and off, it fried a Tivo drive, but the rest of the
Tivo survived just fine.)

/music