Quietest 500GB Firewire drive?

Lacey does not make drives. . . they package third party drives in their own enclosures. major Drive manufacturers are Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Toshiba. Packagers of external drives tend not to source the newest/quietest/fastest drives on the market. . . but the most attractively priced. There are now 500GB drives available in 2.5 inch format from several major manufacturers, including Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, Hitachi. Seagate even sells a FreeAgent Go external that uses its 500GB 2.5 inch internal drive. I personally prefer to source naked OEM internal drives and mount them myself in external enclosures of my choice. . . I like Vantech/NexStar enclosures for fanless solidity and looks. I have recently purchased a Seagate Momentus 2.5 inch 7200 RPM 250GB internal drive and put it in a Vantech enclosure. . . I use it in my very quiet office for backup. . . and I can't hear it spinning while it sits 14 inches from my left ear. Seagate Momentus 2.5 currently has the lowest latency on the market for this category, at 4.17ms. I have just ordered the 320Gb version. . . and I expect we may see a 500Gb Momentus 7200 version in the next several months. The current Seagate 2.5 inch 500Gb drive has a lower rotational speed of 5400 RPM and a latency of 5.6ms.
Http://www.newegg.com
sells most of these wonderous critters. a set of 3 sorbitane feet under the enclosure would quiet things down even further. G.

Simpletech Pro Drive, 1TB. Use it with my IMac, quiet, beautiful, efficient, inexpensive.

Don't like it? Take it back to Best Buy.

If you are looking at SATA drives, I like Western Digital Caviar drives and put them in ICY DOCK Firewire enclosures. These WD drives are very quiet because they have variable rotational speed. The drive should be more than sufficient for an audio bitrate. The ICY DOCK enclosures seem to be very good and you can get Firewire 800 and USB2 and eSATA.

I recommend several full low level format of any new drive. This will cause every block on the drive to be read and written, sparing out any bad blocks. Also helps as a "burn-in" process, to make sure your drive does not die on you when you reach a certain spot on the drive. Anything you can do that will cause repeated reads and writes to the entire drive over an extended period of time (a few days to a month), will tend to weed out bad drives.

Western Digital Caviar Link.

Another vote for 2.5" drives in external enclosures. They are dead silent, use very little electricity and produce virtually no heat. I use a couple of 500GB drives hanging off of my music server. I like them so much, I'm in the process of swapping out the 3.5" drives in my desktop machine.

Prpixel, which 2.5 inch 500Gb drive do you use? G.