Slimline Optical vs Noise?

eddiew

eddiew

eddiew

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Guys, I've just had a nasty thought... next month (post pay cheque :P) I was gonna piece together a fanless mITX HTPC, in either a Silverstone Petit or LC12S case. All well and good, but then I was looking for slimline blu-ray drives at the same time as listening to my Windows DVD rumble along in my laptop, and thought surely it won't be that loud?

...but will it? Out of the last 3 laptops I've had, all of them have had remarkably noisy optical drives under load, and I'm suddenly worried that the quest for the smallest HTPC is going to leave me with a miniature washing machine that vibrates the entire TV stand when watching films on it :(

Anyone using Sony's BC-5500H could soothe me on the matter please? Or if you have an alternative please do shout up :)
 
I have that drive in my ITX build and I can barely hear...anymore thanks to the godawful noise it puts out.
You think of the noise it makes in a laptop, then think about the amplifying effect of putting that in a regular PC case. Not good.
Thankfully I only use it very very rarely.

I would quite like to know if there is such a thing as a quiet laptop drive though.
 
That doesn't encourage me :( Maybe I'll save some money and build a bigger mATX system with a full size drive in it... :/
 
You might be able to dampen the noise somewhat by mounting the drive on strips of sticky trim foam or something. I'm sure a lot of the noise is the case chassis vibrating.
 
I haven't noticed much difference in noise in going from a standard optical drive (sony optiarc AD-7240S) to this slot loading slimline drive.
Both are noisy with standard mounting (not that I use them much anyway).
So either look at some sort of vibration damping solution, or rip any blu-rays/dvds to a hard drive.
 
Can't say I've noticed my slot-loading slimline dvd drive is particularly noisy, and the only sources of noise in my pc are the temperature-controlled fan in the PSU, the pump and a 5400rpm HDD that goes to sleep.
 
Thanks for the feedback guys - will investigate the possibility of vibration damping, though not sure how well that'll work in an mITX case with no extra room :S

Annoyingly it has occurred to me that the cost of a slimline DVD drive + a standalone blu ray player is only very slightly more than a slimline blu ray drive... Add in the player software, and the standalone might actually be better VFM! Seems faintly ridiculous :(


gropingmantis said:
I'm certain that there are quiet drives out there but you would probably be better off posting in Optical Drives section asking about quiet slimline drives.
Click to expand...

You have a good point, I will do so!
 
Can you not limit the spin speed to 1x or 2x? Surely if you are only using it for playback you don't need the spindle speeds found in most drives?
 
paradigm said:
Can you not limit the spin speed to 1x or 2x? Surely if you are only using it for playback you don't need the spindle speeds found in most drives?
Click to expand...

This does sound logical, to be fair. Not sure it's something I can set manually, but maybe playback software, or the drive itself, already do this... Possible my laptop would be a lot quieter playing a DVD rather than installing windows (yeah... busy day at work today), so I'll give it a test tonight. Maybe I'll be lucky and my fears are unfounded :)
 
eddiew said:
This does sound logical, to be fair. Not sure it's something I can set manually, but maybe playback software, or the drive itself, already do this... Possible my laptop would be a lot quieter playing a DVD rather than installing windows (yeah... busy day at work today), so I'll give it a test tonight. Maybe I'll be lucky and my fears are unfounded :)
Click to expand...


Quite a few freebie applications out there to do it, it is 99% the spindle speed that makes the noise hence your standalone player is much quieter. The best solution is to rip the lot that way you get proper silence.
 
a1ex2001 said:
The best solution is to rip the lot that way you get proper silence.
Click to expand...

Logically you might be right... in practise, I'll need at least a(nother) terabyte hard drive, and about a week's worth of insert-rip-compressing. Faced with that I'd rather just buy a standalone blu ray player which will be silent, and reduce the HTPC to an XBMC box. Not quite what I wanted, but still less faff than ripping my entire film collection :/
 
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