Drives getting noisy - good replacements?

[cinnamon_oil]

Hi folks. I have two TiVos, one 40GB (original drive) and one 120GB+40GB (A is a Maxtor of some kind, can't recall, and original drive is B).

Both TiVos are now getting very very whiney - pretty certain it's drive whine and not fan whine.

So what I'm looking for is recommendations for really really quiet HDDs that are also cheap (as I'm going to need to buy two for the 120+40 TiVo to avoid losing programmes - I am right in thinking that there's no way of copying a dual drive to a single drive still?)

Anyone got any ideas?

[blindlemon]

Samsung HA250JC (250gb, 5400rpm) are the quietest drives around and are fairly cheap online.

It is possible to copy a dual-drive setup to a single drive and expand using MFSTools, but only where the "A" drive is the original un-expanded 40gb and the "B" drive has not been expanded either. This cannot be the case if you have a 120gb "A" drive, so in your case, I'm afraid you can't.

However, if your 120gb "A" drive has only 2 MFS partition pairs (eg. 40gb expanded directly to 120gb) and your "B" drive only 1, then if you can find a 160gb drive that's bigger (sector-wise) than the sum of your 120gb+40gb drives you could do an MFSTools copy to that, putting all 3 of your partition pairs onto the "A" drive.

You wouldn't be able to expand that drive, but you could add a 2nd drive at a later stage if required. However, initially, you would be back to a single-drive configuration, albeit only 160gb.

Unfortunately, the quietest 160gb drives (5400rpm Samsung, eg. SV1604N if you can find one) tend to be on the small side and probably won't be able to accommodate your existing partitions. You might therefore have to go up to a 200gb drive - eg. a Samsung HA200JC - but you would be 'wasting' 40gb.

Of course, if you could bear to part with your recordings you'd have none of these problems :cool: