Speaking of noise..

Not long ago I yanked my nice new WD120GB drive from my main desktop, because it makes way too much noise from just sitting there and spinning.

Instead, I plugged in a 160GB Maxtor I had lying around -- one of the very first LBA48 drives ever manufactured. It is much quieter at idle, but makes way more noise when seeking (accessing the drive).

So.. I've just been playing with the onboard "Acoustic Management" features of the drive, and there is a dramatic difference in noise levels between "fast/noisy" and "slower/quieter" modes. Like, a HUGE difference!

So, when reindexing the drive, I can speed it up at the expense of increased seek noise, and the rest of the time I can quiet it down to very reasonable levels.

Nice..!

(Linux: "hdparm -M" )

Cheers